What We Can Know - 22
I was late for my train. As I stood by my taxi fumbling for the fare – and the rural driver insisted on writing out a receipt – I saw across a picket fence the platform and passengers boarding. I heard the carriage doors slamming. I ran onto the platform of this village Victorian station as my train...
I was late for my train. As I stood by my taxi fumbling for the fare – and the rural driver insisted on writing out a receipt – I saw across a picket fence the platform and passengers boarding. I heard the carriage doors slamming. I ran onto the platform of this village Victorian station as my train was pulling out. I stood to catch my breath and watched it go. I had been to visit an old friend, Martha MacLeish, a specialist in modern French literature who had been ill for months with a rare form of blood cancer. The clumsy photograph I took with a disposable camera sits on my desk as I write. She sits up in bed, books and papers scattered about her. Martha’s smile is determined. She had just been told by her doctor that she might live a year, possibly less. We had been holding out hopes for a cure, and sadness for her, for us both, must have made more vivid what I saw next by the summer evening’s orange light. The platform was deserted but for one figure at the far end watching the last carriage recede. Not much in itself, but this was a very small child, a boy of three years, I guessed. He was minute against the scale of the long platform and parallel railway tracks converging on the mouth of a distant tunnel. I looked around. There was no one. I went towards the boy cautiously, not wanting to frighten him. I knew what I was walking towards, the ghost I lived with, and I even wondered if I should turn round and leave. I felt the day’s heat coming off the stone slabs beneath my feet. Stupidly, I felt relief that the child was not a girl. He remained staring in the direction of the departed train.
I stopped a few yards away and called in a friendly voice, ‘Hello. Are you all right? What are you doing here all alone?’
He turned. Dangling from one hand was a limp soft toy. He wore T-shirt, jeans and trainers. Even without the immediate circumstances, I would have thought it was a sad and watchful face. Blond hair, pale skin that had not been touched by our recent heatwave. My questions made no sense to him. Or he didn’t know the answers. He was wary as he scanned my face. He may have already received that first knock to innocence and been warned off talking to strangers. My assumption was that a parent, or whoever, had been lifting an awkward pushchair onto the train when it started to move. I assumed a panicked parent would be making calls to the railway company or police and looking to get straight back on the next train.
At last, the boy lifted his drooping and well-fingered companion closer to his chest. It was a green lizard with red spikes along its spine. ‘I’m waiting for my mummy.’
In that English way, I automatically registered the fully enunciated ‘t’ and was already placing him in a social order. I disliked myself for it. I went closer. ‘Did she go on that train?’
Again, to him the question did not make sense. After a few seconds he said, ‘I’m waiting for her.’
At a sound I turned. At the far end of the platform, a few passengers were gathering for the next train. They were looking in our direction. I said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Christopher.’
‘Shall I wait with you, Christopher?’
As I spoke, I was taking my phone from my shoulder bag. I flipped it open, pressed triple nine and asked for the police. I thought the word might alarm the boy, so I turned away from him as I said it. A voice came on and I explained the situation and where I was. While I was speaking, I saw a man walking towards me at a confident pace. I broke off and said, ‘Hang on, I think someone’s coming to collect him.’
What a relief. The little drama was over.
As the man came up, he said, ‘Ah, so you found him. Thank you.’ He was a chunky-looking fellow with a broad face. Mid-thirties, I thought, quite well dressed, with a fawn linen jacket over a crisp white shirt, well-cut jeans and polished loafers.
‘I was just phoning the police.’
‘No need.’
He went close to the boy and crouched down to speak to him. ‘Are you OK? Ready to come home?’
The child’s expression did not change. He repeated, ‘I’m waiting for my mummy.’
‘She says come over and get you.’
There was something about the way this was said, its speed, its grammar, that caused my relief to give way to the first soft whisper of anxiety.
‘She’s waiting. Let’s go.’
As gently as I could, I said to Christopher, ‘Do you know this man?’ But the boy did not answer. He did not know what he knew.
I said, ‘Wait a minute. Do you know his name?’
The man stood between the child and me and came close. His arms were crossed. I thought he was about to be violent, and my legs went weak.
‘Course I do.’
‘Would you mind saying it, you know, to put my mind at rest?’
‘We’re grateful for your help, Miss, but don’t insult me.’
My voice came out as a croak. ‘If you know him, tell me his name.’
For an answer, he stepped back and picked up the boy, who stared straight ahead. By keeping us both out of his sightline he banished us and the situation. What was happening to him was so remote from his comprehension that he was beyond fear for now.
I was nothing but fear.
‘Let’s go, laddy.’
I tried to stand in his path, but the man walked straight at me and brushed me aside. I said loudly, ‘You can’t just take him.’
‘Watch me.’
He walked off at speed. I ran to catch up, overtook him, turned and tried to block his way again.
‘You’ve got to stop.’
I don’t think he even looked my way as he stepped round me. I reached in my bag for my little cardboard camera. It was slippery in my hand. I ran again, passed the man, and now I was skipping backwards in front of him, shouting – I’ve forgotten what I was shouting – and trying to keep his face and the child’s face on the tiny smeared screen. I had used up my last shots on Martha. We were among the passengers, about a dozen watching us. I shouted at them too, something like, ‘He’s taking this child and doesn’t know him. Not even his name. Stop him, help me!’
But no one stirred. Here was a man and his little boy, pursued by a hysterical woman, perhaps an ex-wife or a discarded lover. A domestic, as the police say. And if it wasn’t that, why get in a fight with a handy-looking fellow when you weren’t sure which side to be on?
Then we were out of the station, on the edge of the car park. A couple of the passengers followed us out to watch but essentially, there was no one to help. Suddenly, the man came at me and, holding the boy steady on one arm, tried to seize my wrist.
‘I’ll have that,’ he said, meaning my camera. ‘Or I’ll break your neck.’
He almost had my hand – our fingers brushed – but I lurched sideways and ran from him towards the nearest car and flung the camera under it. It was, by luck, a large low saloon. To get under it, he would have needed to set Christopher down and crawl in on his belly. Instead, he came after me. I ran round the car. He reversed direction and I did too. My shoulder bag contained books and Martha’s most recent essay and was heavy, but I was wearing tennis shoes and I was nimbler than he was. As the boy bounced about in the man’s arms, he began to laugh. Here was a game of chase he recognised, the first familiar element in an unintelligible half-hour. Childish laughter seemed to bring my pursuer to his senses. Whether he took the boy or left him, the camera and what he thought was its record were more important than breaking my neck. He put Christopher down, told him not to move, got down on his knees and eased himself under the car until only his backside and legs showed. In theory, while he was so vulnerable, I could have stomped on his legs or kicked between them. But I’ve no gift for violence. The thought of it makes me go weak, and besides, at that moment everything changed.
As I took Christopher’s hand, intending to hurry back into the station to be among the indifferent crowd, a police car drew up, two constables got out, ignored me, dragged the fellow from under the car by his ankles, prised my camera from his fist and made an arrest. It unfolded as fantasy, as desperate hope dissolving into a vivid dream that turned out to be real. But it was less magical than that. Not long after I had made my emergency call, one of the passengers at the other end of the platform had also called the police. Minutes later, two others had phoned. Those witnesses had not been as indifferent as I had thought.
A second police car arrived to collect my man. Soon after that, a social worker arrived, a sensible woman who made an instant bond with Christopher and took him away. By that time, I was dictating then signing a statement for the first policeman. When I finished, his colleague came over and said he had just heard that the mother was picked up on Swindon station, fifteen minutes down the line. She had a history of depression and self-harm and had abandoned her child once before. She was in a bad state but able to confirm that she had asked no one to collect him.
I arrived in Oxford at dusk. It was one of those rare evenings one dreams about in winter, when the air seems viscous with warmth, scents and fading light together melting onto the skin as a balm and soaking into the senses. It was an easy decision to walk home from the station rather than take a bus. Within minutes I was crossing Hythe Bridge. On an impulse I turned down the footpath that led in a few yards to the beginning of the Oxford Canal.
I rested on the low wall that separates the canal from the Castle Mill Stream. I was watching a lean hippie-ish man of about my age, still with the ponytail of his youth, watering the potted geraniums on his houseboat. He gave me a friendly nod. He didn’t mind being observed. Hanging by the stern was a paraffin lamp. There was a homely gleam from the cabin. Another life. It looked so simple from where I sat. I could ask to join him and from somewhere along our slow journey north, perhaps where this minor canal met the Grand Union, write my letter of resignation to the college and never be seen again. What would I be running from? I did not want to think about it. As I stood, I felt light on my feet, exhilarated at the prospect of flight, as if everything had already been arranged. The air that slipped so easily into my lungs made it possible. I realised that I was in shock and that I was bound to crash. For now, I thought I should abandon myself to the experience. I picked up my bag and walked back onto the bridge, intent on describing myself in a fantastical third person. She was a Victorian waif, as thin as air, floating up Beaumont Street, along St Giles, onwards up the Banbury Road, on her way to a dusty basement office in Park Town, where an ancient lawyer would divulge in grave tones the terms of her vast inherited fortune from an unknown benefactor.
By the time I arrived at my flat on Linton Road I was coming down. I turned on all the lights and, in the kitchen, as I filled a tall glass with cold water, noticed that my hands were trembling. My mind was trembling too. I opened a window in the sitting room and lay on the sofa. Was I too hot, too cold? Neither. I was alone. No one to talk to. No one cared. Nonsense! My husband was out for the evening at a reunion in an east Oxford pub with fellow musicians. My lover would be back from New York tomorrow in the late afternoon. At the thought of how I was betraying a kindly decent man, my emotions stood ready to be opened easily, like a drawer that slides out at a touch. Here, nestled neatly like soup spoons were familiar items of self-excoriation: I was false, cruel, a deceiving faithless woman whose everyday lies served to keep herself sexually amused. I didn’t think it was like that at all, but I was trying to upset myself. After so much pity, fear, anger and relief compressed into forty minutes, something had to come out and only crying would restore me. I needed tears to help me avoid the nightmare that lay just beyond the periphery of mental vision. Guilt about my affair with Harry was a hard and hot feeling that did not mix with sorrow, and Martha’s situation was too close, too frightening to be exploited as an emotional emetic. Instead, and because he was now safe, I enlisted the abandoned little boy on the platform, helpless and understanding nothing, and that did it. I indulged a fit of weeping, and what release it was. A poor thing without his mother, so determined to wait for her, believing she would come back to him from out of the tunnel, along the same track. And poor me, whose blameless neck could have been snapped in two. Poor world that bore evil in the form of such a man. I wept and minutes later I was done. Feeling better, I sat up. Unbearable to consider what he wanted, what he might have done. The kindest thing one might say was that he was the slave of a compulsion he did not choose. He too wanted to keep himself sexually amused. That rogue thought did it. Horrified at the connection, I stood up and dismissed it. I was cured of emotional blockage. I went back to the kitchen for more water and, leaning on the counter, decided to make a sandwich. While I was cutting the bread, I began to think about the next day’s teaching.
The principal business would be George Eliot’s Middlemarch , three tutorials and a lecture in the afternoon. I had given the lecture last year and had already rewritten it. I needed to look again at the student essays. But before all that, I took out Martha’s introduction to her scholarly edition of the non-fiction of Albert Camus. She had composed her monograph propped up in bed, a drip hanging from a tripod at her side. She managed a few hundred words a day, without recourse to a library. Respectfully, her Parisian publisher had not hesitated to hold up publication. Martha had written in French of course, so I had to go slowly, though I could just about get by without a dictionary. She concentrated on a lecture Camus gave in 1957 in Uppsala, Sweden, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize – ‘The Artist and his Times’. In it, Camus approved of an observation by Gide. ‘ L’art vit de contrainte et meurt de liberté .’ Art lives by constraint and dies from freedom, by which was meant the constraint the artist imposes on himself. For Gide as for Camus, grammatically at least, artists were men. I hesitated. Perhaps Camus was rejecting literary experiment. Further down the page Martha quoted his rejoinder: ‘ L’art le plus libre, et le plus révolté, sera ainsi le plus classique .’ The freest art and the most revolutionary will therefore be the most … classical? Meaning, written in a form and a prose long established in the tradition and therefore immediately understood. Or ‘classical’ meaning such writing would endure and would become, over time and through many appreciative readings, a classic. I decided on the former. Camus wrote his lecture when Europe was recovering from a cataclysmic war, when the world was trying to grasp the possibility of nuclear extinction, and when many of his contemporaries kept righteous faith with a dream of utopia in the Soviet Union, which he regarded as morally bankrupt, dangerous and cruel. In troubled times, Camus insisted, the best writing should be the most immediate in its clarity. Surely, Camus’ writing conformed to that ideal. I wrote Martha a long appreciative letter and wished I’d had the skill to have written in French. For her troubled times, in classical French.
A half-hour later, not long before midnight, I was on George Eliot duties when Percy came in. I could tell that he was just a little drunk, but alcohol only made him kinder and funnier and more cheerful. I shoved the essay aside and listened to the story of his evening. He and his jazz-band mates were soon recognised at their table in the pub. After a din of foot-stamping, they went on stage. They did three numbers on borrowed instruments, with the euphonium player on double bass, and ‘brought the house down’.
Percy broke off to ask about Martha. I said there was bad news and I would explain later. First, I wanted to tell him the story of Christopher. Usefully drained of feeling, I told it ruthlessly, as if to punish myself with details, though I felt nothing. I wanted to convey to Percy every perception, move, spoken and shouted word, all the moods and their transitions, the blank incomprehension of the child, the man’s ugly ferocity, the dreamlike appearance of the police, their grip on his ankles, on his black socks as they extracted him from under the car ‘like a rotten tooth’, and how his white shirt was besmirched by a puddle of engine oil. Besmirched! I had never uttered the word before in my life. Percy followed closely, cocking his head, as if he’d gone a little deaf, and he grimaced sometimes as if I was punishing him with my details, not myself. But oh, that big black-bearded good-natured face, creased with concern. I was hurting him, if only he knew it.
When I had done, he laid his hand, his heavy paw, on my arm and squeezed. His eyes were bright. ‘Many people would have preferred to believe the guy to stay out of trouble.’ He shook his head. ‘What courage, Vivien.’
‘The police have got my camera.’
‘We’ll get it back.’
Later, in bed, it was a joy to be making love and be amazed again by the almost comic union of his bulk and his tenderness. But afterwards, as he slept, I lay on my side, facing away from him, and lingered on the prospect of being with Harry tomorrow evening. I had to see him. There was nothing I could do about it. Or about myself.
*
My father was an airline pilot. That may sound dashing and unconventional, even daring to some, but it was none of those to my sister Rachel and me. He was everything passengers would want in their captain as they settled in their seats and listened to his reasonable reassuring voice. Meticulous, upright, unyielding. He knew how to fly a transatlantic jet and he knew what was right. He was born in 1929 and I suppose he was a man of his time. He did not place much value on the education of his daughters, though he laid it heavily on our younger brother, pushing him hard with expensive extra tuition to get him into a private school with high academic standards. Rachel and I could not remember a single instance when our father took either of us aside for a conversation about anything. Mostly, he ignored us, or told us off. Poor Sam did not flourish at Winchester, which threw him out after two years. Not that we cared, for we had suffered through childhood from making way for our brother in all things and learning from the pilot that we should be helping our mother with the ironing or in the kitchen with the washing-up, while he and his son watched cricket on the TV. We took for granted, as did our mother, Sam’s right at meals to larger portions than ours, even though he was smaller, and that his anecdotes mattered more than those we tried to tell, and that when he was speaking, or prattling, which he did often, our father would hush us with a glance. Poor Sam. No one could go through such a childhood and not become – at least until misfortune knocked it out of him – an arrogant entitled little prig.
What redeemed our father were his frequent absences. During them, lodged in a house of females, our brother shrank enough to make life tolerable. Meanwhile, a state education served Rachel and me well. We got scholarships to the kind of universities that Sam was intended for. We were high on books, movies, plays and art museums. Nothing was expected of us, and we disappointed no one. Unlike Sam, who was spooked by failure throughout his twenties. The world beyond our front gate did not fall silent when he wanted to speak his thoughts. It handed him smaller portions. Once he was done with his drearily conventional crises of drinking and drugging, he came out the other end as gay and a far nicer person. It makes me squirm with regret and guilt that after our mother died, in our thirties, we three abandoned our father, Sam through bitterness, Rachel and I out of indifference. He lived alone. We saw him occasionally for a birthday or a Christmas, but never at the same time. We would say to each other, ‘Your turn!’ When he died, I had not spoken to him in four months. He never told us he was ill. Guilt was his parting gift.
We girls did not come through without permanent stains. Rachel’s were easy to spot. The first time I met her husband, I came close to a fit of giggles. She had married our father! Same impoverished emotional range, same gift for rectitude and disapproval and, in low light, a shared look. Like our mother, Rachel stuck with her husband, never challenged him, and got seriously ill, but unlike her, lived on. My case, my stains, the ones on the surface, were also comic. Of course, a taste, though not exclusive, for older men. Still seeking my father’s unattainable approval? I’ve come to despise those just-so therapy stories. There can never be any proof. Instead, you choose the story that fits neatly or gives most comfort. Another stain: after a childhood and teenage indoctrination in dishwashing, baking, tidying, vacuuming and ironing my father’s and brother’s shirts, I was left with a compulsion that I would overcome only once, with shocking consequences. Those few months apart, I never had the will. If I saw disorder, I moved helplessly towards it and set it right. Until that was done, there was a nagging presence in my thoughts, a feeling of incompleteness. I was troubled if Percy’s washed but unironed shirts were left too long or if the sofa cushions were unplumped or the dishwasher unloaded. Where there was order, there was mental space and calm. I could not read a book while in the same room as an unmade bed. I liked cooking, but I knew that I didn’t have a choice about it. It would shame me to list the lovers I skivvied for and how quickly they assumed it as their due.
Which brings me to the deeper stain. Too many of those teenage boys and men were shits. Again, I could do nothing about myself, not at first. I had to get involved. In the early stages of an affair, something emotionally insufficient, ungenerous or disparaging in a lover would draw me in. I went towards him as I would a pile of dirty dishes. I was not one of those women who were on the lookout for a man to ‘rescue’. Nor was I a masochist. It was just … difficult to explain. Even as I loathed it, I was motivated by the squalid bedsit, the white sheets gone grey, and lying between them, the neglectful partner. As I came to see it, my past cried out, thank you for neglecting me!
The converse was predictable. On occasions, the loveliest, kindest and most sensitive of men would fall for me. I turned them away and they would be crushed into silent despair or baffled pleading. I liked them but found them cloying. I was ashamed of my lack of sexual interest. I could hardly say, look, sorry, but you’re too nice, too attentive and your company is too agreeable, so leave me alone. More considerate to put myself out of range.
So, my father was not dead. He lived in my head, walking my neuronal battlements in ‘solemn march’, like King Hamlet’s ghost, not demanding revenge but projecting into my social world a misogynist’s sulphurous contempt and all the manly indifference I could hope for. It should be obvious that I passed through the therapy mill. I took it from all angles, from every creed. We also spent long hours together, Rachel and I, talking about our childhood. What comfort, to be witnesses to each other’s past. I eventually believed that I knew myself well enough to challenge the ghost and drive him out. But I should have known better. Self-knowledge is not the same as a cure.
Many years passed. The catastrophe descended and I’ll come to it later. I became an academic and as I passed my mid-thirties, I was still on my old path, deep in an affair with an unavailable man. Harry Kitchener was married, emotionally stunted, self-absorbed. What could be better? At the same time, in an act of defiance of everything that I was and despite my deeper stain, I accepted the love of the wonderful caring Percy Greene, an esteemed violin maker, a weekend banjo player, the perfect lifelong friend, and I agreed to marry him.
Eventually, I dismissed Harry Kitchener. Percy and I moved out of the Linton Road flat and set up home in Headington, on a side street off the main road. We were delighted with each other. No pretence on my part. We were happy and everything looked good for the future. Percy built a stout shed in the garden for a workshop. Two good commissions for a violin and a viola came in during the early months. My book on the poet John Clare was out and had some good notices in obscure places. The house was small, far too small for Percy, and the stairs were unnaturally steep but we did not care. Rachel came to stay and brought along her first child, Peter, then a six-year-old, and we loved him. We cooked meals for friends in the half-built kitchen. Man and wife, we began long rambles across Oxfordshire. Percy knocked together a bed out of old oak planks. The night it was done, we made love on it. I was enjoying my teaching. We lived mostly on my salary and we had enough to get by. Happy lives, with everything so fresh.
But sometimes, when alone, I thought of Harry and wondered if marriage had been a mistake. He was a man of the world and we had parted on reasonable terms. I wondered if he would leave Jane, his wife, one day soon. I assumed he was in a new affair and that troubled me. I needed proof. He had been peeved when I announced my marriage plans. I had laughed at such outrageous double standards, and he took my point. Now it was my turn to be unreasonable. I was happy with Percy, but I needed Harry. He commuted by train to London three days a week to his office at Turnbull’s, the publisher. The rest of the week he worked at home in Jericho. Our paths were unlikely to cross.
In 1998, communication had not advanced much in a hundred years. The telephone was still the latest thing in general use. Email was beginning to spread, and I had been signed up for three years but Harry, like most of his generation, was holding out. The very subject made him irritable. He had never missed this so-called emailing in the past, so why should he bother with it now? Capitalism, I once reminded him, invents furiously and persuades us of new needs. We were at the dawn of the digital age. According to Harry, this was the sort of ‘piffle’ that excited mediocrities. In college, my older colleagues had proof that word processing would kill literature. I was afraid of phoning Harry in case Jane picked up. I did not want to phone him at work. He was not associated with any Oxford college and had no anonymous pigeonhole in a porter’s lodge. If I wanted to be in touch with him, I would have to use the ancient Penny Post.
I sent a bland postcard and took care to include Jane in the salutation, but no Percy in the sign-off. Belatedly, I thanked them for their wedding present, a non-stick wok, and hoped to see them one day soon. The absent reference to marital contentment was my signal to Harry, but I also guessed, correctly as it turned out, that he wouldn’t get round to reading the card.
What would I have said at the time had I been asked to set my psychoanalytic determinism aside and list this man’s attributes? As a lover, well, he was ten years older than me, and though he was not tender like Percy, he had a quality of emotionless and knowing detachment that thrilled … that resonated deeply with … no, forget all that. He turned me inside out, for whatever reason. Generally, there was a glow about him. He was tall, very striking, wonderful face, with some resemblance to Stephen Spender, spoke beautifully, had read everything and remembered it all, was witty and, once you managed to get his attention, he was a good listener.
His brother-in-law was the famous poet Francis Blundy, second only to Seamus Heaney, according to some, to others, second to none. Harry Kitchener was a poet too, by general agreement no good at all, too in love with obscure and untranslated classical tags and allusions. In time, I realised that even as he was proud of the association and promoted his work, he was envious of Blundy’s fame and determined one day to rise above him. As poetry editor at Turnbull’s, Harry was shaping the tastes of a generation. He was that rarity in Oxford, a well-known literary type who would have nothing to do with the university. It somehow leaked out that he had declined to be a fellow of All Souls. It was of more interest to some of those colleagues that over the years, Harry had turned down dining rights in Merton, Christ Church and Magdalen among other colleges, including ours. Harry’s one contact with the university was to have played ‘real’ or royal tennis many years ago on the court across the lane from Merton. He once said it was the best two hours of his life. Here was another attribute – he was a good tennis player, competing in his twenties at county level, and he remained formidable into his forties.
Three months after I sent my card, we made contact, and it was not quite by accident. I was invited to give a lecture on John Clare at Columbia University in New York. It was the first time Percy and I were to be apart in our marriage and we made a fuss about it, shedding tears during our long embrace at the Headington stop for the Heathrow coach. My lecture was part of a well-endowed series and a big occasion, especially for me. I had spoken at NYU and Hunter colleges before, but this time there was to be an honorarium of $1,000. There was an audience of 500, the questions at the end were sympathetic and knowing, I was loudly applauded and ended the day immensely pleased with myself.
The next morning at breakfast in my hotel I read in the New York Times that this was the week of an annual international book fair. I did not need to think about it. I took a cab west, to a vast exhibition hall by the Hudson River. Even though I had a map of the fair’s exhibitors, it took me half an hour, threading through dense voluble crowds, to locate the Turnbull’s stall. I must have walked past a million books, most of them new. Finally, there he was, his back to me, stooping politely to listen to a sharp-faced diminutive woman whose face I thought I recognised. I waited by a display of the beautifully designed standardised hardback editions of seventeenth-century poets, one of Turnbull’s and Harry’s great commercial and critical successes. My heart was thudding. What was I getting into? To calm myself, I tried to predict what his first words would be when he saw me. I got it wrong, of course. The woman went away, Harry turned, smiled, but without surprise, and spoke as if we had not been apart nine months but had been chatting five minutes before.
‘That was good last night. No, Vivien, it was very good.’ And he quoted, ‘“Thou’st heard the knave, abusing those in power.”’
I continued, ‘“Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free.” So you came! Why didn’t you say hello?’
‘Too many fans. Couldn’t get near you.’
He smiled to confirm that this was not true. ‘Besides, I hoped you’d come by. I’ve got us a table at the Odeon. Near my hotel.’
He stepped aside to a lobby to make a call. I guessed he was cancelling his lunch date, whoever she was, or making the booking. I didn’t care. The word ‘hotel’ had settled our fates. We could have skipped the restaurant, as far as I was concerned. Instead, we drank a bottle and a half of overpowerful Californian red, and then he wanted to ‘show you my room and offer you a coffee’. Such euphemisms in our liberated times. Simply, we resumed.
Later, as I was leaving his room to go back uptown and get dressed for a formal dinner at Columbia, Harry stroked my cheek. ‘Adulterous Mrs Greene, the king of Saudi Arabia has kindly asked if he might have you buried to your neck in desert sand and have rocks thrown at your head.’
‘But not at adulterous you.’
He kissed me. ‘So unfair.’
In the afternoon of my last full day, I walked up Lexington Avenue on the Upper East Side, feeling good about Harry, about my lecture and the hospitality of my hosts. I was on the lookout for a present I would take back for Percy. Guilt is an accommodating emotion. It can sit comfortably alongside happier feelings, asking only to be softened or eradicated by a kind act. When I saw a bookshop, I went in by force of habit. It was a small independent store that appeared cramped, but it stretched back a long way. The shelves were of an unfamiliar orange-tinted wood exuding a pleasant scent, and finely constructed, with carved fluting on the uprights. The mosaic of colourful book spines in packed receding rows excited me. I occasionally fantasised about an enchanted life on a couch, doing nothing but reading. Reading and sex, perfect bedfellows. I went to the biography section to find my own book, as first-time authors do, and stared hard at the place it should have been.
I began an aimless browsing around the store. My mood was beginning to dip. Almost every book whose title I read, I wanted to read and knew I never would. The cumulative effect of seeing the results of so much labour, researching, composing, revising, doubting, defending then hoping, was spreading an ache of weariness through my limbs. Lingering jet lag, surely. By my body’s uncertain clock, I had been up since 3 a.m. A silly slogan repeated itself in my thoughts: too many books is like too much chocolate. The bookshop air that had seemed so fragrant was now insufficient and stifling. I thought I could fall asleep on my feet. I wanted to leave but I did not have the will. They seemed in league, these busy ambitious authors, striving to teach, frighten or entertain me. To lie down on the floor was tempting. I would not have minded the creaking bare oak boards. People could step over me for all I cared. But I kept upright and arrived at a table, a restored kitchen table, of new hardback history books. It was an act of self-punishment to read the titles. An illustrated history of silk, of the 1944 Battle of Hürtgen Forest, of the valve flute, of the thirteen Chinese dynasties, of children’s furniture, of mental disorders. The past was as monstrously heaped and oppressive as the books about it. I was too weak to face it or them. There was too much of everything.
This odd turn may have been a premature encounter with ageing. I was only thirty-eight. Or it was pique at the absence of my John Clare, my own little squeak for attention. Or it was jet lag. I saw a sign for a coffee bar downstairs and there I shared a table with a young man, bearded, pale long face, rimless specs, threadbare sports jacket, an image of the closeted scholar. But he taught PE in a nearby high school, and we passed a soothing fifteen minutes explaining ourselves. Meeting this warm soft-spoken American with a direct manner revived me and I went back upstairs to resume my search for a present.
I was a long time in the music section before I found on a bottom shelf the perfect obscure thing for my husband, a biography of the eighteenth-century Guarneri del Gesù, apparently one of the finest violin makers or ‘luthiers’ of all time. The book had contemporary diagrams of early modern violin construction. Such a scholarly edition was for a specialised market and cost $70. That would obliterate the guilt.
But not entirely. When I arrived home in the early evening after my day flight, Percy greeted me on the threshold with a bottle of champagne in his hand. He was wearing a chef’s apron. All afternoon he had been preparing a feast. First, my one hot moment of shame as we looked into each other’s eyes, then our tears of joy as we embraced and kissed by our freshly painted front door.
*
I started Tuesday evening classes in Italian. I spoke a little already, so my lack of progress would not be noticeable. I assumed that Jane Kitchener did not know that Harry rented a one-room flat at the top of the Banbury Road, within earshot of the ring road. When I asked him how long he’d had it, he laughed. I didn’t ask again. On his urging, tough though it was, I attended the first two classes, and after those, managed one every four or five weeks. The community centre in Summertown was a fifteen-minute walk to Harry’s place further north. After the lesson, some of my classmates would head for dinner at a Chinese restaurant close by. ‘We’ would attempt to speak only Italian. I went once. Those meals and the lessons I did not attend were sufficient cover. Occasionally, when Percy was away for a conference or driving to Newcastle or Edinburgh to deliver a violin, Harry and I marked up a whole night together. I encouraged Percy to get his band together again, for they sometimes played in pubs outside town. He shouldn’t let marriage stand in the way of doing the things he loved, I would selflessly insist. Around the same time, I persuaded Harry to invest in a mobile phone. The TMI was what he called his, the Tool of Marital Infidelity. What I loved about our evenings included not only the sex, the secrecy, the obscure hide-away and the suppers Harry and I cooked there. They also included books.
I felt, though I could never say, that I had made a sacrifice in marrying a man who had no taste for reading, who would rather fix the plumbing than talk about literature, even though he liked it when I read short poems to him. By an unspoken accord, we used to talk about everything that existed that was not gluing violins together and not books. But a world minus the glued violin is larger than a world without books. It would have challenged Percy’s generous nature to think that I had lost more mental freedom in our marriage than he had. But of course I had. A significant portion of all possible worlds, real or imagined, is touched on or explored in the earth’s total accumulation of books. Violins, completed or not, refer mostly to themselves. This seemed too obvious to state. We were delighted to acknowledge what we each had gained, but Percy and I never discussed what I had lost. In him I had a partner and a playmate, but I also wanted a thought-mate. I never found such a person in college. By convention, high table was devoted to small talk. The American critic Edmund Wilson’s journal reveals how disappointed he was by college dinners at high table, where serious discussion was politely avoided. He was visiting England in the 1950s. After Cambridge and Oxford, he was intellectually liberated to be staying in London with the writers Karl and Jane Miller.
Like Wilson, I needed liberation and thought I was owed someone like Harry. I needed our rambling, sometimes hilarious post-coital cocktails of literary argument, celebration and gossip. His cleverness made me clever. It was rare, but it pleased me when I knew a poem, a book or an author new to him. Tuesdays, late evenings, walking slowly south along the Banbury Road, watching out for a Headington bus, I fairly vibrated with well-being. Easy then, to convince myself that by becoming whole, I was doing our marriage a favour. I could honour and adore my husband with even greater abandon. In the hailstorm of lies I told Percy, I persuaded myself I was virtuous. Truly, I was clever.
But not as clever as the vengeful gods as they perfected my shackles and looked for an opportunity to slip them round my ankles. There are dire developments in life whose earliest signs can be known only in retrospect. Then we might say, I wish I had known! But in my case, it would have made no difference. It began, according to me but not the doctors, at breakfast on a Saturday morning in the early summer of 1999. We were drinking coffee in the back garden. Percy raised a subject that we had been through a few times before. He approached it delicately, with no pressure, he said, but he wanted to be clear. It was the large matter of whether we would have a child. He would love to be a father, he said, but he would respect my decision. Previously, I’d said that I was too old at thirty-nine. I was concerned for my career and the books I wanted to write. I did not add that a baby, in its ruthless way, would demand an end to my Tuesday trysts.
None of this was on my mind that sunny morning. I had decided it was time to tell my husband a shameful secret that only my sister Rachel knew, along with a few people I hadn’t heard from in many years. I’ve kept journals at different times and I have never been able to set down this story until now. The boy left at the station was also forbidden. Nightmares of abandonment have pursued me. I could not confess to my journal, but I could tell Percy. I see him now, his folded arms resting on the garden table, forgiveness already in his look. Whatever he was about to hear, he would embrace it, understand it and love me.
When a young person leaves home after an oppressive upbringing (parents, religion, poverty, in any combination) there might follow a period of destructive rebellion. It can be brief, before the passing years impose some order, or it can last a lifetime. Every case is different, and mine was curious. I worked hard at school, got the scholarship, escaped from home, but remained a diligent student with only the occasional lost weekend, calmed down before finals and came away with a good degree. I moved into a shared house in Clerkenwell with three women medical students and found a job in an estate agent’s office. The work was dull, but I typed fast and I was valued and soon I was promoted and on a commission. These were the early Thatcher years, and there was crazy greed in the air and a house-price boom. My hours were not strict. My housemates were wild drinkers and everywhere there were pink and blue Ecstasy tablets for the asking. My degree seemed like permission, a ticket to do whatever I liked, and for reasons I have tried to explain, I had a string of awful boyfriends. This, not my student years, was my time of breakout. Then, breakdown.
Within six months I was pregnant. The father walked away. If my parents had known, they would have urged me to have an abortion. Sensible, given my circumstances. But coming from them, it would have sounded to me like more of the dead-hand oppression I was in flight from. In the shared house there was a tiny unused room next to mine and with Rachel’s help I cleared it out, decorated it and made a nursery. The housemates were helpful too. My sister was living a sensible life, training to be an executive in an Arab Gulf airline. She lent me money. The baby was born in mid-December at St Bart’s Hospital, a beautiful little girl I named Diana after the huntress. She had a blazing blue-eyed gaze and curly wisps of blonde hair. Everybody adored her and my medical friends fought over the chance to look after her. For six months I stayed at home and was happy. The Clerkenwell house became the centre for gatherings, or parties, weekdays and weekends. I went out a few evenings while one of my housemates babysat. One night I took Ecstasy. I was slipping back into my old routine.
That same week there was a bigger than usual party in the house. About thirty people. I brought Diana down around nine and all the women and some of the men cooed over her. Around midnight I looked in on her and she was fine. I was going back to work in two days and taking Diana with me in her pushchair. I don’t remember how the rest unfolded. I suppose the celebratory atmosphere was part of what drove me to become dreadfully drunk. The music was still loud around two thirty when I went to bed. I hardly dare write this down. I forgot about Diana . I did not go into her room. The fact of her existence did not penetrate my disgusting state. I abandoned her. I sat on the edge of my bed unlacing my shoes and the next time I was conscious it was ten in the morning and I was still fully dressed. Hungover, I stumbled into her room. She was lying on her belly in her cot, face down in a puddle of vomit.
At the inquest, the coroner was deeply sympathetic about my loss and took pains not to mention my drunkenness. Sitting in court, I felt my shame even more intensely. Rachel told me that it was helpful the press did not cover the hearing, but I was beyond thoughts of help. Silence fell like fog and smothered my existence. I became deaf. Or rather, when people spoke to me, I heard their words, but I didn’t hear their meaning. I didn’t move, I didn’t eat or speak. Rachel went to the funeral in my place. The only time I left the house was when I went with her and the medical students to an obscure corner of Spa Fields. We intended to dig a hole with a garden trowel to bury the pale blue teddy that Diana always cuddled at bedtimes. It was a hopeless occasion – heavy rain, a cold June wind blowing and the ground too stony to dig. The idea had been to read some poems aloud, but we couldn’t stand it. I collapsed in grief and at my insistence we brought the teddy back with us. I never saw or heard again from my medical friends. The next morning my sister took me home to our parents.
She insisted that they had to be told. I sensed their reproach in every kind word. To be treated as the focus of their attention was an unfamiliar experience. I regressed to a sour teenager and hated them for all their care, but they kept at it. Eighteen months later, I applied to my university to do postgraduate work and I was accepted for a DPhil. My oppressive parents raided their savings for my upkeep. I took it as my due and I never properly thanked them. In another age, I might have taken myself off to a silent nunnery. Oxford would have to do. All my undergraduate friends had left, and I was glad. I made no new friends and lived alone while I researched and wrote about the poetry and sad life of brilliant John Clare. I knew I did not deserve to have another child.
This, in shortened form, was what I told Percy that beautiful early-summer morning in our Headington garden. When I had finished he was silent for a while, for which I was grateful. The memories of two decades ago had brought me to a tearful state. Percy waited, and at last he spoke through a long sigh. ‘It’s a terrible terrible story. You were young and crazy. You made the worst possible mistake. But you can’t go on punishing yourself for the rest of your life. Having a baby could be wonderful for us both. And redemption. But if you don’t want one, for all your other reasons, well, I’m with you, whatever you decide.’
With that he got up and embraced me and kissed the top of my head, then walked the few yards to his homemade workshop. I sat in a daze. His response was what I had hoped for, and I don’t think I ever loved him more. Perhaps it was time to think differently about having a child. I thought again about that tiny boy at the end of the platform and the mother who abandoned him. By denying a life, I could be a version of her. Time to choose. I went to the bottom of the garden, through the gate to the lane that ran along the backs of the houses and led into an enormous dreary field. I walked for an hour, then doubled back, making a route between the lane’s huge puddles that never seemed to dry out. By the time I reached our garden I had made my decision. I was not going to break in on Percy’s work with such momentous news. I would wait until he came into the house for lunch and meanwhile look at some lecture notes. But it was hard to concentrate. Flashes of deep excitement and a sensation of floating scattered my thoughts. Telling my secret had lifted something dark or had shrunk it and turned it into a seed of hope. Diana, in another form.
Percy worked a half-day on Saturdays. He came into the house, as usual, just before one o’clock. I assumed his work had gone well. He looked cheerful as he stopped in front of the table where I was trying to read and asked if I wanted a sandwich. Cheese, tomato, lettuce and pickle.
I nodded.
‘Coming up!’
I said, ‘After our conversation, I went for a stroll.’
‘Yes?’ He had moved away and was going towards the kitchen counter.
My heart had picked up speed, the way it does when I’m about to give someone close a present I know they will love. I couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I think you’re right.’
‘Yes?’ He said this with his back to me.
‘About self-punishment.’
He was placing a fresh loaf on the bread board and taking a bread knife out of a drawer. He said quietly, ‘Um …’
‘And redemption.’
Now he turned and came back towards me, the knife still in his hand. ‘Sorry darling. I’m lost.’ He said it warmly, as if indulging a child.
I stared at him. He sometimes went adrift in the intricacies of violin construction. I kept the irritation out of my voice. The beauty and importance of the moment was too precious to spoil. ‘I’m talking about our conversation this morning, when I told you—’
‘But Vivien—’
‘—the whole story. And I’ve decided, Percy. I would love us to—’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
We stared at each other. He sat down opposite me and rested the knife on the table. I was scanning his features for some hint of an inappropriate joke. All I saw was bafflement.
Finally, I said, ‘You don’t remember our conversation?’
‘No.’
‘In the garden.’
‘No.’
‘Percy. This morning.’
He was shaking his head, and I was beginning to feel frightened. ‘What have you been doing this morning?’
‘I went … I went …’ He looked around the room in search of an answer.
‘Did you mow the lawn, go to the shops? Did you read a newspaper?’
He put his face in his hands. ‘I’m trying to think. Don’t keep asking me.’
But he could think of nothing. I waited, then I patted his hand and went to the phone. I had a colleague at college, not a doctor, but a professor of neuroscience who long ago had accumulated clinical experience in psychiatry. There was a chance I would find him at home. His wife answered and went to fetch him. He was on his way to tennis, he said, but he had a couple of minutes. I was conscious of Percy watching me closely as I described what had happened.
He was reassuring. It sounded like a TGA, a transient global amnesia. It might last a few hours, during which Percy would not be able to lay down new memories. Not that uncommon. Weird to experience, unsettling to witness, then it lifts. No consequences, no treatment necessary.
‘But he should have a scan. I’ll phone a friend at the John Radcliffe on Monday. Meanwhile relax! He’ll be fine.’
When I turned back to Percy and started to tell him what my friend had said, he spoke over me in the same cheery tone. ‘I thought of making myself a sandwich. Cheese, tomato, lettuce and pickle. Want one?’
‘All right.’
‘Coming up.’
But after a moment he wandered to the other end of the room and moodily stared through the French windows at the garden. Then he roused himself and told me again in the same eerily cheerful voice that he was going to make a sandwich, listed the ingredients and asked if I wanted one too.
When I said I did, he called out, ‘Coming up!’
He made no sandwiches that afternoon. I made them. When I gave Percy his, he took the plate with a grunt of surprise. We ate in silence. Afterwards, he went to the shed and later, when he returned to the house, the lotus-eating spell was over. He had found his current project on the workbench. Everything he had intended to do had been done to his own high standards, but he had no memory of doing it. Or of anything else. ‘There’s a hole in my life,’ he kept saying in wonder.
Two months later we were at a consultation to be told the results of Percy’s scans. The neurologist pointed with his pencil at a screen where smears of grey and black converged. They meant nothing to us, but the drift was clear. My college friend had been right and there appeared to be no neural damage that could have caused the amnesia, and no visible consequences. We were about to thank the doctor and leave when he raised a hand to delay us. He brought up another scan, hardly different from the one we had been looking at. Again, he tapped the screen with his pencil. There was some enlargement here of the ventricles, he told us, and a possible degree of shrinking in one area of the hippocampus. Nothing to worry about now, but another scan in six months would be advisable, and some cognitive tests beforehand. Percy and I were keen to get away from the cramped office and its general air of unhealthy interest in mental dysfunction. The shelves around us were filled with books whose spines declared 10,000 ways a brain could go wrong. We stood, said our thanks and agreed to make a date with the secretary.
My elated optimism never returned, and the question of a baby was dropped. Not even that, for we never got that far. I could not bear to tell Percy the story of Diana again. The luminous idea of having a child had been dimmed by a moment of frightening mental failure. It was difficult to admit it, but the episode challenged my faith in Percy’s strength, his reliability and competence. He was my rock and now a crack had appeared. It could not be wise to make myself vulnerable by having a baby if Percy was to be vulnerable too. The conventional medical view was that transient global amnesia was without consequences. I could not believe this, especially now that a doctor wanted Percy to be scanned again. I explained this to Harry one evening. He listened patiently. He agreed that I was right to be concerned for Percy’s mental health.
For some reason Percy missed his appointment for the scan and cognitive tests and had to wait a further three months. The diagnosis when it finally came was no surprise. A box-ticking cognitive test backed it up. Our neurologist insisted that what I called the lotus episode was coincidental and had nothing to do with his Alzheimer’s. I did not believe him. But it hardly mattered. By then, the long decline had already begun. Percy’s forgetfulness was its most obvious feature, until irritability and then anger crept in. It was all bad and it was all slow, and my own brain’s protective amnesia eased me from one stage to the next.
During the year after the second scan, Percy remained fully aware of what was happening to him and knew that there was no way out. Or that there was only one exit and he could either take it now or let the disease take it for him later. He was depressed, as anyone would be. He told me that our lives together were ruined, that our future had been snatched from us. I would remind him of the marvellous hike we had planned for the next day and the friends who would be visiting, of the plain fact of our love and how we would stay close and live for the present. But he was right. The future looked appalling. We had a few fake rational conversations about suicide – the timing, the method, the need to protect me from suspicion of murder. I say fake because I knew that I would never help him, and he would never do it. I had been told that there would come a time when he would unknowingly cross an invisible frontier and no longer have what they called insight into his condition. Suicide would be forgotten.
We did see our friends and Percy was merry in their company, and our big hikes across Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire were a success. We stayed in old inns and looked round ancient churches and in warmer weather swam in rivers. He often told me how much he loved me. I read him short poems. The shorter the better, he would say. Emily Dickinson suited him well. At home, we cooked together from intricate recipes. He found that red wine was unpleasant and he developed a taste for white. He listened to old Beatles records. He took pleasure in young Peter’s visits. They made a special bond and had ludicrous intimate conversations.
Folded into these pleasures was the long retreat. By stages, his violin work dropped away and was no longer mentioned. When he was confused, he became irascible. He began to resent it whenever I went out. However often and clearly I explained where I was going, for what reason and when I would return, he would be angry when I came home and would accuse me of going off without warning, of deceiving him. That hurt, because those evenings when I was not at my Italian lessons, he was right. The pleasures we had at the beginning were no longer possible. There should have been something both dark and grand, even dramatic, in witnessing the person you love cast off, piece by piece, all the elements of their being in relentless disintegration. But the day-to-day reality of the process was its banality. Percy’s consciousness was a closing door. He became simple, boring, repetitious, unlovely. By common standards, he was grossly unfair, sometimes abusive, then weak, then demanding. But those standards were what he had also cast off. I lived by the irregular clock of his moods. Worst of all, he forgot he loved me. I was the presence who looked after him, fetched things, tried to explain, reassure, comfort. Now and then he had trouble with my name. After some effort it would come, but he had forgotten who we once were. I tried to keep it alive, but it was a lost cause. I went to look around a state-run care home and that was when I remembered how much I loved him and that I could never leave him in such a place. I decided to take extended leave from teaching so that I could look after him properly.
The days of insight, suicide conversations and river swimming, lumpy mattresses in old pubs and declarations of love were two years behind us. Percy had crossed his frontier and I crossed it with him. His journey was mine. There were many milestones of deterioration ahead of us and most decayed in memory as soon as they were passed. But one remained fresh. It was a September afternoon. I was in the garden clearing up the dying summer’s growth. My best resource apart from Rachel’s respite visits was Percy’s newly developed taste for daytime television. There was nowhere in the house where I could escape its gaudy clatter but that was a small price. At least I could be on my own in the garden knowing that he would not be moving from his armchair. I was lifting withered plants, shaking the earth from their roots and tossing them into a wheelbarrow. I went indoors for a glass of water in the kitchen and checked on Percy. He was in a state of high excitement. His game show or whatever had been interrupted. The screen showed a jet passenger plane flying into and slicing through a tall building I immediately recognised. Then a cut, and a second plane hit the adjacent tower. And now, another jump in time, a long-lens view across the East River and the second building sinking into itself as though in slow motion. I stood frozen in horror. There were hundreds, if not thousands of people in that building. We were watching their deaths. Then we were back in Manhattan. A colossal cumulus of dust rose up and surged through side streets and people fled before it. And now we were watching the first tower go down, and again, the second tower. I could not speak. But at each new shock, at the two impacts, the twin collapses, Percy punched the air and shouted ‘Wow!’ And ‘Brilliant!’ And ‘Again!’ He turned to me, his face flushed and contorted with joy. He was scanning my expression, wanting me to share his elation.
‘Don’t you like it?’ he shouted.
I left the room and went back into the garden. I assumed that people were sharing their anxiety that what had happened in New York was about to happen everywhere. I called Harry on my Nokia. Like me, he had seen it late and we exchanged shocked impressions. Everyone was doing the same that afternoon. I wanted to see him, but there was no chance. He was in London for work. I called my sister and then my friends and repeated the conversation – it was important and reassuring. I could hear from inside the house Percy’s happy cries as the footage was shown yet again. By remaining in the garden, I was keeping away from his infantile insufficiency, the high wall of stupidity that the disease had built round him. Shocked reporters were speaking into microphones, the urgent drumbeat music announced that this was news, global news, and history must surely bend to a new direction. But Percy understood nothing. His grisly joy made the catastrophe appear even more horrific. Irrationally, I felt shamed by him. While others embraced loved ones for mutual comfort, my husband squawked with delight, like a toddler out of control or, for all I knew, like the mastermind of the attack, watching from a mountain hideout. Yes, yes, I knew that his brain was dying, his mind shrivelling. But the habits of ordinary personal exchange die a slower death. Until I made the effort and intervened, my automatic responses to Percy were moral, not clinical. In the instant, I could not help judging him by what he said or did, as I would anyone else. Then I would be furious with myself that I could momentarily forget that he was ill in a special way. Not with a fever or cancer or a tricky heartbeat, but through a transformation into a lesser being of – dare I name them? – lower intelligence, few interests, diminished sympathies, a man unable to act coherently in the social world and with an enfeebled grasp of the actual.
On three occasions, before it became too difficult, I went with Percy to a support group run by the city council in a room in the town hall by Carfax. He did not speak but sat calmly and seemed to be following the discussion. The atmosphere was kindly, and I learned a few useful tips and spoke up a couple of times. There were around fifteen of us carers, two-thirds of whom were men. I could not agree with the lady who described the husband by her side, with some maternal fondness, as ‘adorably childlike’. A child is in a constant state of becoming. Its curiosity is instinctive and its world is expanding. I said nothing and smiled supportively like the rest. I gathered from the group that Percy had deteriorated at the same rate as the others. The carers confirmed what I had begun to suspect. Alzheimer’s patients can reach a plateau. For a long while their symptoms do not worsen. For a year or two or even three, they are trapped in their condition and make no advance towards their final release.
Stasis or decline, it was a vile prospect and I counted more and more on Harry to keep me sane. At the beginning, it had been easy enough to drop the pretence of the Italian lessons and leave Percy on his own. When that became impossible, I depended on my sister’s overnight visits at weekends. We did not talk about it but she knew what I was up to. She and Peter were happy to spend time with Percy and allow me a break. I knew she was glad to get away from her needling, bossy husband, Michael. He had never approved of her career as an airline executive and now motherhood had taken its place. My few hours at the top of the Banbury Road swelled in importance. Sometimes, Rachel had to cancel because of her own health, or Percy’s needs were too pressing and I would have to let Harry down on the day. He was always understanding. As my visits became irregular, I came to resemble the cloying lover I used to run from. I was attentive, I brought him little gifts, I insisted on more than my share of the cooking. I became sensitive to any perceived slight. That he was so kindly whenever I had to cancel made me suspicious. My changed and somewhat neurotic behaviour was getting in the way of our pleasures. Our amused and ironic exchanges faltered. I suspected he was being careful not to upset me. Even as I saw all this, I could do nothing about it. It made me more desperate not to lose him. If I did, I thought I would go mad.
The network of gossip within and between the colleges was a finely wrought construct. On the phone with a colleague one morning, I heard the latest. Harry Kitchener’s marriage was in trouble. He had a lover and Jane was throwing him out – not for the first time. In another call, a friend confirmed what I already feared. This lover was not me. She was a young editor at Turnbull’s. Everyone there had known about it for a year. Two days later my mobile rang. Certain it was him, I fumbled with the buttons and by mistake cancelled the call. When it rang again, Harry said he was in the lane by my back gate and wanted to see me. Percy was watching TV. I ran down the garden like a fool, as if I was rushing towards good news. Rumours are not always true. Harry had brought his car up the lane and was standing by its open door. Jaunty piano music was playing on its radio and that annoyed me. He didn’t waste time on greetings though, oddly, he was smiling at me. He had come, he said, to tell me what we both knew.
‘It’s this, dear heart. We’ve run our course. Pressures on me, bigger ones on you. I thought I’d get it out before you said it to me.’
This was supposed to be disarming. I said, ‘Please turn off the radio.’ My only concern was to keep face.
He reached into the car. ‘Begone, Fatso Waller.’
The sudden silence did not help me. I said, ‘I haven’t been myself lately.’
To concede like this was to risk throwing away the one lively element of my reduced life. But I kept an expressionless look. Perhaps it appeared stony.
He was standing behind his open car door with his arms resting along its top, still smiling, as if he was enjoying a pleasant chat over a five-bar gate. ‘Agreed. But let’s not forget. It was a lot of fun for a very long time.’
My lower lip was starting to quiver. I sucked it in and managed to say, ‘Yes, it was.’ Dignity was all.
‘And we got away with it.’
‘I suppose.’
He stepped round the door and approached me ‘So … dearest, “since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”.’
The old quotation game. I could not suppress a puny dry laugh, which I thought might push me over the edge into tears. I said in a flat tone, ‘“Passion speechless lies.”’
‘Never once caught you out,’ he murmured just before we kissed lightly on the lips.
‘I should get back to Percy.’
He nodded and turned towards his car, and I went back through the gate, determined not to watch him drive away.
*
This laconic dismissal coincided with a shift in Percy’s condition. He was still crossing his plateau and it was not so much decline as a subtle intensification of his symptoms, of what was there already. His repeated questions and remarks were more frequent and expressionless, as though he too were bored by them. When he followed me about the house, he stood closer, his great bulk a reminder of how constricted my days were. The upsets and tantrums were not more frequent, but they were louder. He wanted to hold my hand. At first, I was touched but he insisted at inconvenient moments, like when I was cooking or making the beds. When I pulled my hand free, he was tearful. These minor upsets made me irritable and I tried hard not to show it. Instead, I turned on myself. I had good material for self-loathing and I should not have needed a demented husband to bring me to it.
I was outraged by the way I had stood there, sweet and decent sort, mousey and passive, obliging with my nervous laughter while Kitchener preened. So determined not to play the victim that I became one. I let him dump me unchallenged. Long ago he had moved on to his young editor, retaining me until it was inconvenient. How smooth he had been this last year in his deceit. That I had been cheating on Percy I set aside. That cheating had been my and Harry’s daily bread I did not need to consider. In the lane I suggested I’d been poor company. All my fault! I let him kiss me. I played along with his stupid Drayton quote. I should have called him out on his ludicrous oily manner. I kept myself awake at night refining the terse remarks that would have cut him down. At the very least, when Harry claimed that ‘we got away with it’, why could I not have said, ‘I hear that Jane has chucked you out’?
Our conversation out the back lasted barely two minutes and was such a humiliation that I couldn’t let it go. I squirmed at the memory of standing on the edge, the shore, of a puddle in house slippers and lumpy corduroy skirt, while he lounged by his car in pressed suit and starched white shirt playing the dandy, on his way to Turnbull’s, wearing the tie I had given him a month ago. After all that had passed between us, how dare he toss me aside in seconds. It was a relief to direct my anger away from myself. I loathed him. Next stage, I wanted to do something about it. As the weeks passed that resolve did not fade. It swelled. I was learning something about myself. I had a capacity for bitterness that surprised me but kept me from self-pity or depression. I considered what I would do in the real world, a parting shot that might extinguish his insulting smiles from my thoughts.
The solution came by post in the form of a handwritten note from a friend, Shelley, I used to work with, arranging literary events. She was inviting me to an evening at the Sheldonian. The poet Francis Blundy would be reading his work and talking about it with his brother-in-law and friend, the editor, critic and poet Harold Kitchener. I had once met Blundy at a conference. I remembered a combative five-minute conversation about poetry in translation. I had two weeks to prepare, time enough to arrange a respite visit from Rachel and Peter.
Percy’s need for sleep at the end of the day was growing. Perhaps his plateau was gently tilting downwards. Into the late evenings I read Blundy’s work with pleasure. I still had the knack of committing lines to memory without effort. I read up on his private life, many affairs, a messy divorce, and the poets he valued or dismissed. Hard to explain or excuse the happiness I felt in those days of preparation. I wondered if I was becoming someone else. I had never experienced such impatience for revenge. Having a purpose, however base, made it almost tolerable, my life with a man whose brain was infested by ‘amyloid plaques’ and ‘tau aggregates’, whatever they were. It was glorious to leave those microscopic assailants behind. In the early evening of the big day, I waved goodbye to my husband, sister and nephew as I got into the taxi I was taking to Broad Street. I had a toothbrush and fresh underwear in my shoulder bag.
I arrived in good time. A long queue was already forming in the courtyard. I went straight to the front and walked in. I knew Shelley’s assistants from public lectures I had arranged in the past. I was shown into the auditorium and had my pick of viewpoints. I chose an aisle seat four rows back, dead centre, to be in Kitchener and Blundy’s sightlines. Ten minutes later they let people in. It was going to be a packed house and the place filled rapidly. I spotted a few colleagues, but if they saw me, they pretended not to. I understood and felt for them. They knew that Percy’s condition could only worsen. They would have to lower their spirits with polite enquiries, and such conversations are hard to terminate. I was relieved not to be talking about the business I most wanted to forget for an evening. I sat snugly in my isolation as the din of conversation rose around me. Impossible to explain to anyone the elation I felt at being out of the house, away from my caring role, at a cultural event in which I was to play a part. I might have looked like one more member of the audience, but I was an agent, an angel of justice. For the first time in over two years, my little cup of self-worth, once habitually full, was overflowing.
Shelley came on stage to make housekeeping announcements that included fire exits, future events and thanks to sponsors. She did her best with feeble jokes at which the audience tittered generously. Her halting speech was earnest and decent. Mr Blundy would not be signing books afterwards. Instead, there would be signed copies on the bookshop’s table. All the better, I thought.
At the organiser’s cue, the two men strode out to loud applause and cheers. All that I once admired in Harry, I now loathed. His height and stoop, his fraying grey hair, the affected vaguely ironic way he waited for his guest to sit before he lowered himself into his chair with a mock grimace. From there, he launched into his introduction of overheated sloppy praise. I alone knew how jealous he was of his brother-in-law’s enthronement as a national treasure. We were in bed together once when Harry read me his parody of Blundy’s style that he dared not publish. The target was a spoof of a supposedly typical dissection of some small human moment. I told him it was funny, bang to rights and so on. I had no choice when we were about to make love. But Harry’s poem was too bitter, too vehement to be a decent parody. I remembered a line by Dwight Macdonald to the effect that the good parodist does not go hunting with a machine gun. Unspoken admiration, not contempt, was a more effective motive. In Harry’s case, envy blackened the page.
He rambled on in his louche dishonest way while I continued to look at his face, his eyes. He appeared not to see me, even though I had edged my chair sideways several inches into the aisle. When Kitchener finished and Blundy stood to go to the lectern, the place went wild. Very un-Sheldonian. Not since Mark Twain received his honorary degree here in 1907 had there been such a friendly eruption. The younger half of the audience would have been made to study Blundy’s poetry at school, and now took a more benign view than they probably did at the time. Like many famous people, he seemed smaller than his publicity photographs, and better, I thought, more sculpted about the face and grand in the way an eagle is grand. Sitting or standing relaxed, he looked as if he had filled his lungs with air, ready for a confrontation. He was compact and muscular. You would not have wanted to try out one of your newfangled fashionable opinions in his presence. He started by thanking Harry, his ‘loyal friend’, and said he was pleased to be back in the Sheldonian. The last time he came it was to listen to Philip Larkin who, it turned out, had not been invited or scheduled. On being told this at the door, young Blundy had left in disappointment, in no mood for a lecture on the military strategies of General Philippe Leclerc. ‘I must have misheard the night before. I might have been drunk.’ There was laughter and the beginnings of applause.
He said he would start with a poem he had recently completed. Then he waited for a half-minute until he had complete silence, and it was in this frozen hiatus that he caught my eye. It happened in a slow-motion double-take. The line of his leisurely pale grey gaze passed through mine, and two seconds later flicked back. I thought I saw a barely perceptible nod as we exchanged a look, as if he was already agreeing to or deciding on something. Pure fantasy. I was gratified by the glance but no more than that. Blundy was merely instrumental to my scheme.
He was famous for knowing his work by heart, but this one he read from a sheet of paper he took from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was an end-of-the-affair poem, a sonnet that held to the Shakespearean form, rhyme scheme and final couplet included. It was densely written and on first hearing, difficult to follow. Surely, a tribute to the master. Its central conceit was that an affair or marriage that ends resembles a whole life. He and his lover do well to stop short of blundering senility. After a small-hours brawl they decide on ‘mutual euthanasia’, though they ‘forgot to slaughter the regret’. Now it is too late to go back, for that life is done. Regret is all they have. The poem was too grammatically convoluted to strike the right melancholy tone. But I was not sure. When he was done, Blundy stood to attention, glaring at his listeners as if he could force from them total comprehension, slavish appreciation. The audience knew not to clap. Or they did not dare. He was like the concert pianist who remains motionless over the keyboard, hands still poised, after the final chord has died away. Blundy exhaled loudly through his nostrils and began to introduce the next poem. He was a frightening bastard, I thought.
He read two more poems, both familiar to me from recent reading, and then he sat with Kitchener for a short conversation. Harry’s questions were as convoluted as Blundy’s sonnet but stripped of verbiage and attitude they amounted to the usual stuff. How did a poem begin to form? What were the respective roles of memory and invention? When and how did Blundy know a poem was finished? Who were his first readers? There was weariness in Blundy’s curtailed responses. He had been questioned too many times. Kitchener appeared to weary him too. The man who had championed the Blundy opus in two critical books was a useful idiot. Harry had found a fine place for himself in the literary culture, shaping Turnbull’s poetry list and praising a man he envied and personally disliked. Grandly, the poet did not answer the last question about first readers. Instead, he went back to the lectern and, without introduction, recited another poem. We all knew this one, ‘In the Saddle’, and I knew the poems that followed, but even as I admired them, I had doubts. I read more poetry than most. Some of Blundy’s was long and required sustained and focussed attention. Not seeing the words of a poem on the page were to me a form of blindness. I was a reader, not a listener. The audience appeared rapt. When literary heroes hold forth, the atmosphere gets churchy, but I wondered if many in the Sheldonian were daydreaming like me, thinking about what they would be doing next. I was imagining a paper plate of finger food at the reception. Then I would be ready to make my move.
An hour and twenty minutes passed before Kitchener announced that there was just time for a few questions from the audience. The silence was tight. No one wanted to risk asking something daft. At last, from the front row, an elderly lady with a bent back spoke up and asked Blundy what he thought of Tennyson.
He said, ‘What do you think?’
She straightened as she said proudly, ‘I believe he was a genius, one of our greatest poets and nothing will convince me otherwise.’
Blundy clapped his hands and laughed. It was not an act. ‘I’m so glad. I agree with you completely. “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven.”’
Famous lines from my favourite Tennyson poem, and generously spoken. The applause rose as Blundy stepped away from the lectern to go and shake the woman’s hand and start a conversation with her. He had brought the event to a close, stealing that customary privilege from Kitchener. It had ended well.
I was among the vice chancellor’s guests as we filed down the narrow stairs to the basement reception room. There were more than eighty of us in the wide room, not so select a company as I had expected. In the roar of raised voices I had the impression of general release. School is out. No more poems. I felt that way too. Francis Blundy was facing a horseshoe of respectful male students. I saw Harry Kitchener at one end of the long drinks table, talking to a historian I knew. I went to the other end, took a glass and moved to make sure I was in Kitchener’s sightline. I looked around, hoping to spot waiting staff with trays, or paper cones of miniature fish and chips. A woman, a Russian-literature specialist from my college, came by and asked after Percy. It turned into a cheerful exchange. Her husband had died a few years back of motor neurone disease. Of course, there was emptiness and grief, she said, but only at first. On the far side was freedom after the heavy duties of care. In summer, a year after her bereavement, she and friends rented a dhow with a local captain and three-man crew and spent six weeks dawdling through the Dardanelles, stopping to explore islands. There were barbecues on deserted beaches. After a swim by moonlight, she had, at the age of sixty-seven, tried marijuana for the first time and loved it. I told her I would feel guilty even thinking about such pleasures. She laughed and said that she could see that I meant it. But I was still young, she told me, and there were adventures waiting for me.
She lifted my spirits. I stood patiently through the vice chancellor’s welcoming speech and the great poet’s measured response. I made my way through the throng towards him. Yes, I would rent my dhow right now.
The students were determined to keep hold of Blundy, but as soon as he saw me he said, ‘Aha. Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse us.’
He watched them as they dispersed. ‘Nice kids. Read more than I had at their age.’ Then he turned to me and when I shook his hand and told him my name he said, ‘Ah, John Clare.’
Encouraged, I said, ‘I won’t tell you how brilliant that was because you’ll have heard it enough. Instead—’
He cut me off by spreading his palms and shaking his head.
I had been about to flatter him with a technical question.
‘Look, Vivien. Have dinner with me.’
There it was – done. Or half done. I said, ‘What about the vice chancellor?’
‘I bailed out last week. Anyway, he needs to get to Heathrow. Just say yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll go now, if you don’t mind. I’ve had enough here.’
‘Shouldn’t you say goodbye to Harry Kitchener?’
He nodded. ‘But don’t get caught up.’
We made a wide arc around the edge of the room to avoid his fans. As I followed him, I recalculated. His first poem, the sonnet, suggested that he was between affairs and available. Getting out of long book-signings and post-reading dinners with local worthies and organisers was routine. I was as instrumental in his scheme as he was in mine. I was at least forty minutes ahead of schedule. It was going too well and I should have been suspicious, not of the poet, but of fate. Someone in the crowd put a hand on his elbow to detain him but he kept going. For all my shifting about, I was still not certain that Kitchener had seen me. If he hadn’t, all the better now.
He had moved only a few feet from the drinks table. I did not know the elderly couple he was talking to. As we approached the group, I kept close to Blundy’s side to make matters clear. I had my reward. Harry saw us and before he could prevent it, his mouth opened just enough to part his lips, then he recovered and forced them into a smile of pleasant welcome.
‘Maestro. They ate from your palm.’
‘You were solid as a brick, Harry. As always. We’re about to head off, so …’
‘Let me introduce you. This is Charles and Edna Grosvenor, who might be lending the Ashmolean a Willem Kalf.’
‘Ah, the Golden Age,’ Blundy said as we shook hands with them. ‘Will there ever be another and will we know it?’ And then he added, ‘And this is my friend, Vivien Greene.’
I found myself saying, ‘Nice to meet you,’ as I shook my ex-lover’s hand. It was limp in mine, and cool and sticky. Strong emotion? I hoped so. I let Blundy do the rest. He merely raised a hand, made a farewell nod in the direction of the Grosvenors and put an arm round my shoulder to steer me away. More beseeching hands snatched at his arm as we went back along the edge of the crowd. Blundy was brisk. ‘Misha, sorry, have to rush. Let me know how it goes.’ There were similar brush-offs until at last we emerged onto Broad Street in relative solitude.
*
On the short walk to the Randolph, he took or made three quick phone calls. Mildly offended, I kept my distance. After the third, he stopped and muttered as he bent over his phone, ‘I’m turning this bloody thing off.’ In the end I did it for him and at the same time tried to show him how. He would not have it. ‘That stuff is torture to me.’ Then he began an exasperated account of time wasted doing events like the one he had just left. Prompted by phone technology, he was talking himself into a bad humour.
‘Boring travel, hard work, no pay. They think they’re doing you a favour, paying for your hotel.’
‘Why do it then?’
‘I’m not. Two more and I’m stopping.’
This was when he told me, just as we came to the hotel entrance, that he had found a buyer for his London house and was doing up a place in the country, fifty miles west of Oxford. ‘A new life!’ As he talked, we headed not to the dining room but up the stairs, to his room on the first floor. I said nothing and followed him in. His hosts had at least spent money on his accommodation. We were in a comfortable suite with a lurid floral carpet. On a polished round table were flowers, a bottle of wine, a jar of stuffed olives, mixed salted nuts, a bowl of fruit and a welcome note in copperplate on a card from the management. I sat on a deep sofa with the nuts while Blundy opened the olives and drew the cork and described his rural retreat. A barn of unbelievable dimensions. All around, a rural paradise. His architect was a genius. When the balloon glass was in my hand, he picked up the hotel phone and asked for room service. Was Dover sole OK, he asked me over his shoulder. That done, we clinked glasses. Anticipating his new life and ordering dinner had improved his mood, and mine improved with it. Now that I had delivered the blow to Harry, I was wondering if I had to go much further. Dinner yes, for I had not eaten since breakfast. But I had seen the pretentious four-poster bed and its mock-medieval drapes, I had listened to the prickly poet’s resentments and expensive barn-conversion plans, and I was wondering how I might painlessly slip away after the fish and tiramisu.
But the evening changed direction, as it was bound to. Courteously, my host sat across from me on a hard chair and asked me about myself. I explained that I was on extended leave from teaching to look after my husband. Blundy’s mother had also suffered from Alzheimer’s, and though his sister Jane and her first husband had done most of what he called the daily stuff, the heavy lifting, he had been very involved. A protracted nightmare, we agreed, and an open question whether it was worse to be the patient or the loving carer. We compared experiences of the mood storms, the disorientation, the pathetic disintegration of a personality. I lamented my constricted and ever-shrinking world. Percy and I were in the same prison, suffering in different cells. Blundy said that was his sister’s experience too. He described how his mother on two occasions became lucid again, completely herself, asking concerned questions about the family, whose names she recalled without difficulty. Then, after a few minutes, she sank away from them again. She was, he said, like a drowning woman breaking the surface to gulp the air for the last time. I said that if Percy had a moment like that, it would frighten me. It would be like a haunting. Blundy disagreed. He had been there for the second bout of lucidity. It came two days before she died. His mother drew him and Jane towards her and knew exactly who they were. She thanked them and whispered goodbye. It was a miracle, it was joyous. If it should happen to me, I was bound to treasure it, he insisted. Neurologically it was a mystery. Those memories were clearly there but inaccessible to the sufferers. Some researchers thought the phenomenon might offer a clue to useful therapies. I recalled Percy’s lost morning and said I could not help thinking of it as his first symptom, though medical science said otherwise. Blundy thought we all experienced some version of Percy’s amnesia. Nearly all of life is forgotten.
Our dinner arrived and we shifted to a table at the other end of the suite. We moved on to dementia and madness in general. I said that in my early twenties I believed there was a redemptive and creative element to madness. At that time I was close to the tragedies of the children of older friends, gifted teenagers who became schizophrenic, delusional, paranoid – frightening and self-destructive states that inflicted misery on their respective families. That cured me of romantic notions about creativity and insanity, even as I became interested in John Clare’s work. His most famous poem was written in the Northampton insane asylum. Blundy, like his brother-in-law and like me, was a prolific quoter. He murmured the sad hypnotic lines: ‘I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows? / My friends forsake me like a memory lost. / I am the self-consumer of my woes’. I said that there was no point pretending Clare was a misunderstood depressive. In later life he was seriously delusional. He claimed he was Shakespeare. But I accepted that he and a few others, including Van Gogh, were exceptions to the rule that psychotic states were terrifying disorders and generally nothing good or wise came out of them.
Blundy said that when he was nineteen, he was severely disappointed in love. He took himself off to a borrowed cottage on the north Norfolk coast. He had never taken drugs before but had come into possession of five tabs of LSD. Each one, he had been told, was a ‘major trip’ and it was advisable to start with a quarter or an eighth. In a dark state, he swallowed all five and within an hour ‘I entered hell’, and it got worse and lasted not just hours but more than a year. Even then, he was not completely free. Sometimes, without warning, the experience would burst in on him and he would return to a state of terror. After that first hour, everything he looked at – the clouds he saw through a window, the ceiling beams, the dark fireplace – bore a message for him personally of infinite malice. A bush at the window gestured accusations in the wind and blamed him for not killing himself. His hands became independent of his will. He knew that if he let them creep up his chest, as they kept trying to do, they would surely strangle him. He did not dare go outside for help. Obscenely gesturing trees were waiting for him. He was huddled on the living-room floor, his hands clamped between his knees, trembling and mute with fear when a knock sounded on the front door. He heard it open, then heavy steps. A giant lizard with green and blue markings and bloody mouth came right into the room, walking unsteadily on hind legs. It turned on him a look of loathing and swore at him in a language he did not understand. It was clear that he was about to be eaten alive. He screamed continuously until the creature retreated. Now, it too waited for him in the garden. He learned later it was the cleaning lady from the village.
The lizard made me laugh and I could not stop. It was not nerves. I was having fun. Fortunately, he was laughing too. I was in danger of wetting myself, so I stood and went in the direction of his pointing finger to find the bathroom. There I recovered and splashed my face in cold water. When I looked in the mirror I was pleased to see how young I looked. I felt young too. I reckoned that I had not laughed in two years.
When I returned to my seat, Blundy said, ‘For eighteen months I was in therapy. I took a year out of my degree course. Mentally, I was badly shaken up. But at least this ridiculous humiliating episode taught me what madness is, what a psychotic paranoid delusion is. The entire universe of objects and people are threatening you with hateful messages. Everything makes horrible sense. You see patterns of dark significance where there are no patterns, no significance, no darkness. You shrink before the world. No good art can come of that. So I bless sanity, and I don’t care about the definitions. We know sanity when we can think about and act coherently in the real world, the one that we share. To hell with relativism.’
Staff came in to clear the plates and set out the dessert. I noticed how little we had been drinking. After more than ninety minutes of conversation, the bottle was two-thirds full.
When the waiters had left, I said, ‘But you can be sane and bad.’
‘Surely. Rational people can do a lot of damage.’
‘It’s a narrow band. More like a tightrope. Easy to fall off.’
Blundy poured himself some wine at last but put barely an inch into his empty glass, then he passed the bottle to me. As if playing a defensive game of chess, I poured a similar measure.
He said, ‘I’m not sure about that, Vivien. There are many ways to be sane.’ We were silent for a minute. ‘But I like your tightrope. Good or great art might come when the artist thinks he’s about to fall, or when he’s had an encounter with madness but still knows what’s real. Like Blake.’
‘Like Sylvia Plath.’
He paused again. I thought he was about to disagree, but he said, ‘In the second half of the twentieth century there was no better volume of poetry than Ariel . She had her deep disturbances, but only a rational mind could find her kind of poetry to communicate them, the beauty and the terror, the violence …’
‘Not all dark,’ I said. ‘“Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”’ Following his lead, I forced myself to first-name him. It did not sound right. ‘Francis, were your very devout parents insane?’
‘Good question.’
We ate the sugary dessert while he thought, and this was where the conversation turned and we talked into the night about our families, that deep well, the shifting story which, even as the years pass, still needs to be rewritten. We had been around the subject many times together, Rachel and I. We summoned our indictments, anger and remorse. Our brother – spoiled brat, druggie disaster, redeemed and living happily with a talented agreeable man – came in for it too. The day might come when, simply to be free, we might dump our gripes in favour of misty celebration of our parents. I already acknowledged that they had rescued me. I was expert at talking about my family, but I was waiting for the poet to go first.
So it began. He explained that his parents were decent people, loving and attentive and, strict Anglicanism apart, his childhood was happy, though constricted by post-war austerity. By his early teens he was out of sympathy with his parents’ beliefs. He refused confirmation classes and stopped going to church. There were arguments and distress, particularly for his mother. In the end, what kept the peace was her certainty that as he matured, he would return to the fold. By sixteen he knew he was never coming back. He wanted to be an existentialist and then a socialist and anti-imperialist, and later, a beatnik and then, briefly, a scientist, and finally a freethinking poet. It was harder for Jane. She was two years younger and close to her mother. Her late-teen breakout cost them both dear. Was religion a form of mass delusion or even a mild psychosis? Long ago he used to think so but not now. Too many decent intelligent and fully functioning people were believers. Instead, he thought it might be a deeply embedded inclination within human nature, sustained over hundreds of generations, to find supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. But, ‘Now, at last, thunder is not an angry god.’
He was quoting from an early poem. I knew roughly the line that followed but did not want to get it wrong. Here was a new turn – I was anxious for his approval. At least I knew the title. I said, ‘Galileo.’
He almost smiled. ‘Now it’s your turn.’
I let myself go. The high-flying father who thought daughters were not worth educating, the complicit mother who tuned her attitudes and feelings to his, the brother compelled to failure by the pilot’s expectations, us girls liberated by neglect into a decent education, but pursued by an emptiness and hunger that we had spent years trying to define. I spoke of my family with an intimacy I had only ever shared with Rachel. I even borrowed some of her lines and spoke for us both. Unprompted, I pushed on into my late teens and my taste for uncaring boyfriends. I set out my theory that it was my father’s indifference that I was pursuing. After university came the men, equally terrible in the blur of my estate-agent job and mindless partying. As I described the shared house I began to slow and to hear a drone, a dullness in my voice. I was no longer the expert.
Blundy interrupted. ‘If there’s something you don’t want to tell me, then leave it.’
His tone and look were carefully neutral, but I read into both a degree of acceptance that set me free. I told him the worst story of my life. I laid it out as I had for Percy that morning in the garden. But no tears. I wanted to get it right, and though breathing while speaking was difficult, I thought I brought clarity to my disgrace. I did not hold back from describing my drinking or Diana’s face in a pool of sick or how upset I was by the coroner’s kindness. I was not the first to discover that it can be easier to tell an intimate secret to a stranger. I pushed on. Rachel’s rescue of me, the long retreat at my childhood home, my stony ingratitude towards my parents, the desperate application to do postgraduate work at Oxford where I buried my sorrow in John Clare’s.
A waiter came with a tray of coffee. Blundy suggested that I took mine to the sofa while he signed for our meal. Behind me, the dishes were being cleared and loaded onto a trolley. I felt agreeably emptied out. The waiter left. Blundy came to sit beside me and I assumed that now, having exchanged so much, our night must begin. I was resigned rather than actively hungry. I imagined a comic cockney voice saying, ‘’Ere we go.’ Sure enough, Blundy reached for my hand.
‘The concierge is calling a taxi for you.’ Perhaps he saw in my expression a hint of surprise, for he added, ‘We’ll meet and talk more. I think we have to.’
I nodded and said, ‘I think so too.’
We sat side by side in formal exchange of phone numbers, emails and addresses. The concierge phoned to say that my taxi was waiting. Blundy walked me to the head of the stairs. We did not kiss. He took my hand again and gave a squeeze which I returned, and that was enough.
It was two fifteen when I let myself into the house and removed my shoes. Carrying my bag with its dry toothbrush and fresh underwear, I went stealthily up the steep flight of stairs, avoiding the three treads that creaked. If Percy had woken, he would have made demands and bent my evening out of shape. But it was not easy to sleep. I smiled in the dark at the story of the poor cleaning lady, wearing lipstick I assumed, confronting a screaming lad curled up on the carpet.
I had been an unfaithful wife – again. More seriously this time. If Blundy and I had had a night of wild sex, I could not have betrayed Percy more. I had told another man my most important story, my core of shame, the story that my husband could not retain. I came as close to Blundy as I was to my sister. I had laughed tonight and I had talked and listened in a way I had forgotten was possible. There was another thought, more complicated than the rest. It concerned a failure that should have bothered me more. I had set out to punish Harry Kitchener and discovered in the process something unpleasant in my ingrained passion for revenge. I regretted that but, more importantly, I had allowed myself to become ensnared. There was nothing I could do about it. I had been seduced by conversation, like Desdemona when she listened to Othello ‘with a greedy ear’. After Kitchener, Blundy was in another league, a higher and more complex species of human. The mind, as I had already noted, was our most erotic feature. I needed Blundy’s mind, just as I had, at other times, needed sex. I longed to turn it on again, this flow between us, the emotional immediacy, the simplicity. I wanted his attentiveness and insight. I had to see him again. Even today, the convention persisted that I should wait for him to contact me, not me him. He might not. He was busily famous, likely to move on. At that possibility, anxiety squeezed my heart and I did not sleep for another two hours.
*
Harry Kitchener’s furious letter came later than I expected, almost two weeks after the Sheldonian event. By then, too much had happened, and it gave me little satisfaction. He accused me of ‘petty vindictiveness that surprised and disappointed me’. He reminded me that we were consenting adults who had agreed that our affair was over. ‘Our responsibilities in this are equal.’ Watching me at my ‘silly manoeuvres’ that night made him ashamed to have been associated with me. What rendered the letter ineffective was the stilted prose. Harry without his sheen of nonchalant irony became a whining supplicant. He did not have the courage to own up to being hurt. His single typed sheet was like a relic of a teenage past, the sort of thing a once-feisty girl might come across years later in an attic shoebox of ardent letters from forgotten boyfriends. I returned the letter to its envelope and slipped it into the book I was reading.
Or trying to read. Thirty pages in a week. In the days that followed the Randolph Hotel evening, my domestic situation became yet more difficult. As if suspecting something, Percy gave up his early nights and was now rarely asleep before midnight. No corner of the day was my own, unless there was an afternoon TV programme that did not upset or excite him. After three days, a friendly email came from Francis Blundy. He wanted to know when and where we could meet. It took much coaxing to get Rachel back. She had been in hospital. Heroically, she agreed to come for one night, but she could not get to Headington until eight.
Same hotel, and a small room now that Francis was paying. This time, conversation was the birdsong that preceded sex. Home again the next morning I thought I might be in love. I told Rachel everything over the phone. When I said I was feeling ‘unhinged’ looking after Percy, she suggested that I put him into respite care for a few days. I was sickened by the idea, but I arranged to visit again a local place that catered for dementia patients as well as for the vulnerable old. I had no choice but to take my husband along. I told him we were going to look at a hotel. He believed me, but he was reluctant to come. The care home was divided into two ‘wings’ and we were shown the dementia section first by a friendly Filipina carer who was sweet to Percy. He did not respond.
She knew her charges well. The main room was dominated by a television showing a documentary featuring reindeer. Facing it, in battered high-backed chairs were a dozen residents, some of whom were dozing. We went to the vacant room that could be Percy’s. It was eight dilapidated feet by ten. A small window faced onto a wall and a parked car. In the main part for elderly residents of sounder mind, we were shown around by a young woman from Poland, equally friendly and capable. Same big TV with reindeer, and thirty or so watching. On a cork noticeboard was the programme for the week – bingo twice, a singalong, a conjurer. The couple of residents I spoke to, both men, seemed to think I was an official of some kind and were nervously deferential. Silently, I sounded out the depths of my intellectual snobbery. Old people were dim, timid and culturally impoverished, tolerant of condescension and in awe of authority. This was what dragged the country down. Many here would have fought in the last war and seen danger, death and heroism beyond my generation’s imagining. Some might have suffered through childhood in the Great Depression. They should be standing on their dignity. I did not ask if there was a little library apart from one pine shelf of severely foxed pulp fiction. I knew the answer. I would rather Percy were dead than leave him here. I could not consign him to that poky room, the singalong and bingo, even for three days. Even for love of a poet.
On the bus home I wondered at the good-natured underpaid staff working in this dreary underfunded place. My selfishness would never allow me to make a sacrifice like theirs. I tried to remember the last time I did anyone a favour. I was that bad. Instead, I asked favours, like phoning my little sister and begging, wheedling and bullying her to come for three or four days at half-term. She refused outright, then guilt crept up on her and she said she would think about it. I suspected she was intrigued by my affair with a famous writer and wanted it to blossom. Her life of childcare, sporadic illnesses, abandoned career and a martinet of a husband must have made my diminished existence appear exotic. While she was making up her mind, Francis wrote to say he had heard of a promising place that had recently opened. So Percy and I took a bus to the eastern edge of Oxford. We found a Victorian primary school, long abandoned, with smashed windows and wide scorch marks on the brickwork. Rubbish and junk were strewn across the playground. A faded sign announced that after refurbishment, a new ‘care facility serving the community’ would be opening in June 2000, almost two years ago. On the bus ride back, Percy said plaintively, ‘I hate hotels. I want to go home.’
With changes of minds and dates along the way, it was fixed – in three weeks, Rachel would come with Peter and stay for four nights. A long time to wait, otherwise a perfect arrangement. Percy and our nephew got along well, and Alzheimer’s had brought them even closer. My mood improved. I had ahead of me, its distance shrinking by the hour, my island of discovery, four unbroken days with Francis.
We were not completely denied each other. Apart from a stream of emails, in which I was disloyally expressive about my frustrations with Percy, we had clandestine meetings at the back of my house. Francis made frequent trips from London to the southern Cotswolds to check on his barn conversion. His route brought him minutes from my house. As he approached the Headington roundabout, he would phone me from his car. If I was occupied with Percy, he would swing right in the Cheltenham direction. If Percy was inert before the TV, he would come straight on into Headington, turn into the gravel lane and park near our back gate, on the exact spot Harry chose when he came to dump me. Francis and I would sit in his car, embrace and talk. We spoke longingly of the four days to come. We were like teenagers in love, though we did not attempt to make love on the back seat. He wanted to show me his barn. There was also a dairy, built in 1804 and not in use for a hundred years. I would see the magnificent setting and meet the architect. I never lingered in the car more than twenty minutes and our partings were tender. ‘The time has come,’ he would say sometimes in homage to Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, ‘for me to set out on my journey westward.’ Once, as we hugged, it thrilled me to see that his eyes gleamed with tears. I stood by my gate, watching and waving as he reversed his car through the puddles to make a three-point turn. He would blow me kisses through his open window as he pulled away. Then I would go indoors to resume my role of guardian and nurse.
But now I was animated and cheerful. I had a hazy sense of a new future, of a door opening just a crack, and through it I foresaw the suffering and tragedy that Percy and I must endure before that future was realised. Too bleak to dwell on. I had to live for the present and be a loving wife to Percy, more positive, inventive, and above all kinder. If guilt was driving me, it did not matter. I straightened out the house, especially the living room and Percy’s bedroom. I sat with him and we discussed the television he wanted to see. He could not find the programmes or remember their names or when they were on. It was the children’s stuff he liked, certain cartoons and Blue Peter and ‘things about animals’. I wrote out a schedule of times and channels so that each day I could get him to the right place. That made more time for myself, but I sat with him for half an hour every afternoon watching a children’s show and talking about it with him. It had to be done immediately. Within minutes his grasp and recollection of what he had just seen began to fade.
A bout of organisation brought me one afternoon to the shed. Whenever I passed it in the garden, I had blocked it out. Too sad a reminder of another life. Now, I could face it and unlocked the door for the first time in eighteen months. I had brought with me a vacuum cleaner and a bucket of cleaning materials. I had no good reason to be spring cleaning here. Percy would never work again, but it helped to pretend that he might. When he returned after a miraculous remission, he would be so pleased to see his studio in good order. Looking after his special place was another way of caring for him. And it was simply too depressing to let it rot.
There were many dead spiders, their bound prey suspended among the ruined webs, there were dust balls, and a fruity smell of neglect. On the workbench, a coffee mug and, at its bottom, a dried disc of mould. The poor yellowish light was at one with the neglect. An overhead bulb did not dissolve the gloom. The problem was the cobwebby windows, stained on the outside by polluted raindrops. The last tool Percy had in his hands, a fine chisel, was lying across the bench. Next to it was a mound of velvet cloth. I unwrapped it and found the replica violin he had been working on. It was without its strings or a bridge. It looked beautiful, ancient. Its sensuous human shape was picked out around its perimeter by a dark raised edge.
As I held the violin in my hands, my good intentions began to collapse. The man who made this gorgeous instrument had vanished. While I stood in his workshop with my stupid array of cloths, cleaning fluids and rubber gloves, another man was slumped in a chair staring dumbly at a cartoon that would barely distract a five-year-old. Despair swelled in me and my grip on the violin tightened. It was senseless, beyond irrational, but I let myself blame Percy for wrecking our lives. Soon, my unpaid leave of absence from the university would be up for review. My academic career was on the edge of collapse. We had no significant savings left. We would live meagrely off the state. Our daily round was nothing but crushing repetition. It was fixed that everything must get worse – slowly and with only one end. It was his brain, not mine, that was ruining us. Our lives were wasted. His violin stood for the life we once had. I was suddenly furious. From nowhere, its name came back to me. I held the Guarneri by its narrow black neck and lifted it high, ready to use all my strength to crash it down against the workbench. Just then, I saw hanging from a peg the apron and goggles that little Peter used to wear when Percy brought him into his workshop and found things for him to do. He was so kind to the boy, so sweetly protective, always ready to take him seriously in their long chats. Even now, Percy was lovely with him. He would have been a wonderful father. Remembering what he once was pulled me back from self-pitying rage. I set the violin down, paused to calm myself, then wrapped it in its velvet cloth. I became tearful with remorse as I stepped outside and started to clean the windows – self-pity in a harmless form. I checked on Percy, then came back to the shed to dust and tidy the shelves and workbench and vacuum the floor.
I had started keeping a journal soon after seeing my future husband playing in his jazz band in the Cowley pub. My entries were never regular, and I often had to force myself to write them. I tried to keep going because, like Francis, I believed that most of life is oblivion. To rescue fragments of the past would be to claim a bigger existence. I had made other attempts in my teens, twenties and thirties, and each time had given up after a year or two because I was too busy or too tired or because my life was too repetitive. This time, I was determined to hold on until old age defeated me. Like most people who talk in private to themselves on the page, my loyalties were to the truth as I understood it at the time. If I had to present myself in a poor light, I did not care. I had read several published journals over the years. Among my favourites were Samuel Pepys, of course, and a politician, Alan Clark. Neither was afraid of letting the world know they could be calculating liars, greedy, selfish, vain and disagreeable. I aspired to their high standards, and I failed. I began to worry about the future of my journals after I was dead. I did not want Peter as an adult to know how weak I was. At the end of my life, I might not have the strength of mind to destroy an extended record of myself. But if I was going to destroy it, no point writing it. Subtly, my journals were becoming the report of a better self. I would have denied it, but over time the entries ceased to be private. I had a reader in mind.
When I spoke to Rachel that evening, I described coming across the violin and ‘becoming upset’. Not untrue, but not the truth. My dear sister was tender and sympathetic. Before going to bed that night I told my journal the same story. I was teaching myself to lie by omission. Most useful, for behind and ahead of me were acts that were too shocking to own.
*
Percy was in deep unhinged conversation with Peter, and Rachel was watching television. I was able to leave the house by the front door without fuss. Francis was waiting for me in his car. We kissed and as he pulled away from the kerb, I put my hand on his knee.
‘Do that and I won’t be able to think straight.’
I laughed and kept it there. And he was right, for when we got to Headington High Street, he turned towards the centre of Oxford instead of making for the inner ring road a short distance away. He had a second chance moments later and could have turned at the filter towards Marston, but he kept on. I said nothing. He had made this journey many times. We crossed Folly Bridge and stopped behind a long line of traffic. There were a dozen policemen ahead of us, two on horses. Streaming past us, heading in the same direction, were the city’s young, mostly students, some with placards. I remembered. A cabinet minister with responsibilities for the environment would be talking at the Union that evening. A big climate-change demonstration was planned. St Giles and the surrounding streets would be closed. On banners and posters I saw black capitals on red background – OIL IS GREED and BEWARE SEA LEVELS. Every minute of my four days was precious to me, and I was annoyed with them all, until Francis took over. His knuckles were white as he gripped the wheel. He was a better hater than me. He thumped the wheel with a fist.
‘Fucking loony-left dupes. Ignorant credulous scum. Goddamnit! We can’t even turn round.’
For obscure reasons of their own, the police had closed off the other side of the road. The traffic was stalled ahead of us and piling up behind. We were trapped. Blundy’s outburst obliterated my own irritation. I muttered, ‘Well, I suppose the kids might have a point.’
He turned on me and shouted. ‘I can’t believe you’ve fallen for this fucking claptrap. You idiot! You, an educated—’
That did it. Life with a demented husband had worn my tolerance low. I unfastened my seat belt and put my hand on the door release. ‘Enough. I’ll walk back.’ I pushed the door open a few inches and took my bag. I could not believe that I was about to get out. He clutched at my arm.
‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. That was rude. Appalling. I apologise. Please, please don’t get out.’
I said, ‘I didn’t know you could be a screaming hysteric.’ Even talking to him was a concession. But I did not push the door further. My teenage self would have known how delicious it would be to get out. I had a streak of stubborn sulkiness back then. But misery would follow, and much untangling, according to the grown woman who knew that Francis could coax her back. I hovered between these selves.
‘I beg you to accept my apology. It was disgusting behaviour. I’ve thought of nothing else but this time together. We got stuck here and I exploded. Humiliating. Disgusting. Honestly, it will never happen again.’
I took my hand off the door, but I did not close it. ‘All this swearing makes you sound like an old man out of control.’
My voice belonged to a prim stranger. When it suited me, I liked swearing. I looked through the windscreen. The police were letting cars through one at a time at longish intervals. I pulled the door shut.
He murmured, ‘No more swearing, I promise.’
We sat in silence, waiting for the bad moment to dissolve. He knew it was too soon to reach for my hand, and I was glad of that. It took us fifteen minutes to reach the front of the line. We were not permitted to turn right and loop round to our route north then west. Instead, we were sent up the High Street. When Francis had to stop to let a surge of demonstrators cross the road, he remained silent. I was familiar with his kind of views. I occasionally read the Telegraph , Spectator and Wall Street Journal among others. Francis was hardly alone. I assumed something nasty in the climate was coming our way, but slowly, and it did not occupy me much. I felt vaguely grateful that others were protesting on my behalf. Further on we were sent on a long clockwise turn around the city centre, past the ice rink, where Percy used to take Peter, across Hythe Bridge where I dreamed once of heading north on a barge. We passed Worcester College where, as a student, I was found in bed with a disagreeable rugby player, now high up in railway management. Then, past the Phoenix cinema, where I once watched the same Éric Rohmer film three nights in a row.
All these landmarks in a city from which I had been isolated. They seemed drearily familiar and again, as we headed westwards at last, crossing open country at speed, I indulged dreams of leaving when, of course, I had to stay. But I was leaving now, and here was my dhow. Setting out in it with a man I thought I might love, a man who thumped the steering wheel in fury while shouting at me, thereby fulfilling my preferred form of partner. No escape from myself, whichever compass point I fled to. If I stayed and one day resumed my career, I would not only be teaching, I would be fighting again, in committees. We had fought off the construction of a giant mosque on land part-owned by the college, just as we would have opposed a giant cathedral, but we failed against a business-studies building. Biotech was blurring the boundaries between commerce and academia, kids were deserting literature and history to get rich in finance, underqualified foreign students were admitted as cash cows, and we, the old guard, argued against it all and defended our shrinking corner of the humanities, not yet as underfunded as other places, but demoralised, uncertain, our old centrality to the culture gone, our various subjects sunk in the postmodern turmoil of their separate civil wars over ‘theory’, or race or gender or social exclusion – battles that were mostly generational and unnaturally fierce. It was time to leave.
Ten miles out of the city, the atmosphere between Francis and me neutralised. We talked of harmless matters and collaborated in persuading our four days back into their proper shape. Our destination was a useful subject and he spoke of the project with excitement. I asked obliging questions. The architect and foreman would be there to walk him round the site and talk through latest developments and problems. There were already cost overruns, but he had planned for those. What was in prospect, he explained, was a radical shift in his life. He was exchanging a town house in Islington for a rural idyll, one existence for another. He had been amazed by how much his London place was worth. A charming woman from a village close by would be a part-time housekeeper, and chauffeur once he had taken the decision to give up driving. Her husband would be occasional gardener and handyman. Bookshelves were being constructed in a workshop near Witney and were going to be beautiful, the views of the valley from the master bedroom would be stunning and his study, already taking shape, was unlike any he had ever had. As he went on, I had the sense, vague at first, that Francis was talking of a future in which I was implicated. He referred again to an outbuilding, the dairy, in which he thought I would take a special interest. He did not wish to say more about it now. It was absurd, for he knew my circumstances, but it was also amusing, even a touch erotic, and I played along and said I couldn’t wait to see it.
Some miles from Stroud, we turned down a narrow road with passing places, and two miles later we took a narrower farm track cut into the steep side of a valley of mature beech trees. Thirty feet below us was a meadow of buttercups, and a stream with a wooden footbridge, and before us the head of the valley rose to a natural plateau in the centre of which was the big barn, its roof covered in plastic sheeting and surrounded by scaffolding. Several cars and vans were parked close by. Our track dipped down to cross the stream and rose again to the site.
In a portable cabin, where plans and diagrams were spread on a table among chocolate-bar wrappers and empty mugs containing used tea bags, I was introduced to the architect Simon, the foreman Vicenc, and a couple of the trades. I was given a yellow jacket and hard hat to wear and heavy boots that had been ordered specially in my size. After some routine jokes about health and safety regulations, we went on the tour. The barn, two centuries old, was enormous. Partition walls were already in place. I was advised to be careful stepping over power cables, copper pipes and bags of cement as I was shown round various rooms in the making and asked if I could stretch my imagination to grasp the beauty of it. I could. I kept saying, ‘How lovely.’ A long corridor opened out at one end into the poet’s sunlit study. In the huge open space that would be the kitchen, dining and living room, an immense limestone fireplace was under construction.
Discussions began and Francis was required to make decisions. I did not think he cared for or much understood the technical details, but he was anxious to show that he was in charge. Simon and Vicenc steered their client to the correct or convenient choices. I left them and wandered away from the barn and crossed to a hedge where there was an old gate, beyond which the ground dropped gently towards the stream, almost a river, that wound across the rich green and yellow meadow. Francis had told me it ran uninterrupted by hedges and fences for at least a mile. John Clare, who lamented the enclosure of land, would have exulted in it. I had assumed that Francis, as new and proud owner, had been exaggerating the attractions of his acquisition, but it was an enchanting location. Most valleys like this had traffic running through them. It was a secluded place suspended beyond time, a secret that had to be kept. Standing there, somewhat rapt, I began to think of Francis in different terms, as a capable man of interesting tastes, one who could take control of his fate and steer it towards an enviable unusual result. Where most would be content with a terraced house, he had taken possession of this plot at the top of a gem of an isolated valley and was ready to make a new life on his own terms. He dominated people with his own style of reasoned kindness. There was no scheming. He did not even know he was doing it. He was logical and he cared. It was obvious to him that the one he cared for should do as he suggested. I thought of him then, not as a poet – that was a side issue – but as someone determined to have what he wanted, and I felt a little afraid, and at the same time exhilarated, a mix I had not experienced since my early twenties.
I heard him calling me and went back across a muddy and rutted terrain which, Simon had explained, would be an immense lawn framed by flower beds. I had forgotten about the dairy. It was on the far side of the barn and Francis was outside it now, waiting for me. It was a dilapidated building of weathered honey-coloured stone, in contrast to the barn’s darker brick and timber. A set of high double doors, wide enough for two cows to step indoors side by side, was rotting and the hinges were partly torn from their timber frame. Perched on the roof line was a crumbling dovecote.
Francis was in a high state. ‘What do you think?’ he shouted twice over, when I was still a way off. ‘Wouldn’t it be perfect?’
For what, for whom? I did not ask. When we went inside, he steered me around, gripping my elbow, for fear I might run off. There was not much to see. The old milking stalls were still in place, but the building had been used as a beef-cattle shed by the last owners. With extravagant sweeps of an arm, Francis set out his plan. A big study here with woodburning stove, small bedroom on this side for those nights of working late, a good bathroom right where we were standing, this window enlarged for the view, a separate lavatory over to the left, a counter for making coffee, a butler sink, a fridge. Perfect, was it not? I said it was perfect.
We stayed on site two hours. Before leaving, I would have liked to take the path down the valley to the footbridge, but Francis insisted that we had a long drive ahead and he was already feeling tired. Three hours later we were parking in a street of flat-fronted dove-grey terraced houses of, I guessed, the early nineteenth century. Francis’s place was the sort of tasteful book-crammed environment I was familiar with from the homes of north Oxford colleagues. In a knocked-through sitting room on the ground floor, above an outsized fireplace, hanging at a careless tilt, was a long-ago gift, a Howard Hodgkin painting that overflowed onto its frame. Elsewhere in that room was a baby grand, an ancient gramophone with a brass horn, and two giant chesterfields facing each other across a long oak coffee table piled with books and periodicals. I lay on one of the sofas with a cup of strong tea, reading a recent copy of Areté while Francis snoozed upstairs. It was an unexpected way to begin an idyll, but I was content. Precious, to have time alone to read or browse, or kick off my shoes, lie back and stare at the brown stains on the ceiling and think of nothing much. I felt at home in this scruffy serious room.
I woke to the sound of footsteps on the stairs and was struggling into a sitting position as Francis entered. He was in fresh white shirt and grey flannel trousers with sharp creases. His face was pink from his shower. He had a drink in his hand, and billowing under his chin was a paisley cravat, a modest item of male display I had not seen in years and it made me smile. My bag was upstairs, he said, and a bath was drawn. He would be waiting here for me and we could discuss dinner. For half an hour I lay below the rising steam, staring up at another stained ceiling. From downstairs I heard a familiar Satie piece played clumsily, with many pauses and faltering repetitions. I hoped it was not for my benefit. I had not bought new clothes in a long while, and as I went downstairs I felt mousey and vaguely undefended – a feeling I get wearing the wrong stuff. Francis sprang out of his chair when I entered and offered to ‘build’ me a drink and told me how well I looked.
‘You are a gent,’ I said. ‘A negroni please. That was you at the piano.’
While he mixed my cocktail, he told me how he had wanted piano lessons all his life but at every stage, from when he was twenty, he thought he was too late, too old to start. Eighteen months ago, just after his fiftieth birthday, he got down to it. Six months ago he had taken his Grade One exam. He found himself in an anteroom with other students, waiting to be called in. In silence, they sat on identical dining chairs, probably from a job lot.
‘I was the only one there whose feet reached all the way to the ground. The others, little girls from the same school, with bunches, pigtails and white ribbons, nervously swung their legs while they waited. And I couldn’t. But we all passed! Afterwards, very excited, we compared notes, as one does, and told our stories, where we went wrong with “Frère Jacques” or with the scales and how we thought we were bound to fail. Vivien, those kids treated me as one of their own. I never felt so flattered and happy.’
I listened to this story as the icy negroni warmed my throat and chest and suspected that there might be no going back. How far removed he was from that intimidating spectre at the Sheldonian. What man had ever run me a bath and offered to construct for me a luxurious study in a pastoral paradise? It aroused me to think I had no choice. I went to where he sat, took his head between my hands and kissed it. Then I found his lips. Our operetta of an idyll began with our making love on the chesterfield. I worried that the curtains were not drawn and we could be seen from the street. But the high back of the sofa sheltered us. It was as if this was something we did every evening, for later we gathered up our clothes from the floor and dressed in a routine sort of way while we discussed where we would eat. Like a couple married for thirty years. He suggested an Italian place where he was known – a few minutes’ walk away, five tables crammed into a busy kitchen. There we ate parmigiana and a green salad, and this was where I learned for certain what I had suspected. Francis was planning the life we would lead together. The building site became the Barn. For the first time I heard the word capitalised as he conjured our workplaces, my dairy, his study, the books and poems we would write, the garden we would tend, the friends we would invite. It was delightful nonsense. I had to interrupt.
‘Francis. You know I can’t.’
But that too was, as builders say, all taken for. He allowed for a change of subject by reaching for my hand across the table and remaining silent for several seconds.
‘I understand. But we know that your situation can’t last.’
I waited.
‘You know better than I do. It’s a progressive disease. Soon you won’t be able to manage. That means some kind of care home. Or something. After that there’s the only end, as Larkin put it. It will be very very hard for you. I want you to know that on the far side, there’s a life.’
But Francis knew there was no care home. I felt suddenly sick. Too much olive oil in the aubergines. I drank deeply from my water glass and said, ‘I can’t think that far ahead.’
‘No need. But I can. That is, if you’d like me to.’
‘I don’t know. I need to think. It feels … callous, having a plan while he’s still … it’s bad faith.’
‘I understand.’
‘I need to think.’
He said gravely, ‘Take your time.’
We went back to his place, undressed in his bedroom and made love again before we slept. I was intrigued to find in Francis the lover a tender submissiveness – such a contrast to his fully clothed and commanding social self. He wanted me to take the initiative, which was not in the pattern of my usual choice of man. I was hesitant, then I adapted without much effort and felt happy and free. The pattern was set for the next four days – reading, talking, sleeping, loving and restaurants – my kind of Elysium – until it was time for me to go home.
*
I am writing these words in longhand at a wooden table in our back garden. The view below me includes Glenuig Bay, a pub and its car park, and away to my right, steep hills rising towards Mount Roshven. Early May, a slight breeze, no midges yet, and at my back, indoors, Jane Kitchener is preparing sandwiches for our muddy tramp through Smirisary to Port Achadh an Aonaich, a sandy beach favoured by kayakers. I have yet to pronounce its name correctly. The local people are friendly towards us. None of this ‘it takes forty years to be almost accepted’. Besides, a few around here, including our electrician and our roofer, are English too. I heard by a roundabout manner that we are known as ‘the two widows’. No contesting that. Our departed husbands preoccupy us, but we are businesslike about it, or them, and our lives of elective exile are pleasant enough.
My journals are on a shelf above a writing desk in our cottage sitting room, but I’m happier to be free of them and exercising my memory. Working hard at it, as in a mental gym, making the effort and prising open a scene, opens others along the way. It gets easier the more I try. In addition, guilt and remorse are useful aids to memory. I use the journals mostly to remind myself of the sequence of events, on which memory is notoriously weak. The past, jumbled in the mind, survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present. A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.
*
Returning from my four nights in London to my earthbound existence was easier this time. I was helped, paradoxically, by an immediate crisis. No time for lamenting fate, mine or Percy’s. The evening before I got back, he and Peter were happily playing a board game. It came out of nowhere, a sudden frightening lunge, and Percy slapped the boy hard about the face. I saw it for myself the next day, a tender red patch on Peter’s cheek. He would not go near his uncle. Rachel was desperate to leave. Percy was sulking in his bedroom. He had forgotten the incident, but its shadow darkened his mood. He knew something was up and that he was to blame. I wasted much time attempting to get him to come down and apologise. I had in mind how much I would be needing Rachel and Peter in future. But Percy lay on his back on the bed, forearm covering his eyes, refusing to move or speak. Rachel’s suitcase was already in her car. Usually, we passed an hour together before she set off. This time, she was curt. She’d had enough, she had problems of her own. When I spoke cheerily to Peter, he turned away. I was lumped with Percy into a single source of pain and humiliation.
After they had left, it took up much of the evening, coaxing Percy downstairs to watch some old recordings of children’s TV that I kept for times like these. Slowly, his mood improved. While he watched a programme about a petting zoo, I made supper. My attempts to get him to talk about his attack on his nephew went nowhere. It was gone. Instead, we sang some songs and looked through a photo album together and talked about the pictures, or I talked about them, our adventures in the past. Here was Percy, backpack in one hand, car keys in the other, outside an inn by the Evenlode River. Here I was on a woodland path by a patch of bluebells. Here was a smiling Percy presenting a recently completed violin to a happy customer. To each photograph, Percy made an appreciative humming sound of assent. Our doctor had told me that this was an effective way of keeping the memory from decaying. It was hopeless, but I persisted. There was nothing else to do in the hours before bedtime.
When at last Percy was asleep I read three emails from Francis but was too tired to write more than, ‘Some pressure here. Will write in the morning.’ I hesitated over the usual last three words. I had just kissed Percy goodnight. The betrayal, my outrageous infidelity, was too fresh for my exhausted spirits. But omitting our habitual sign-off would demand an explanation. So I wrote the sentence anyway. ‘I love you.’
After those Islington days, everything stood still for Francis and me. There were various unconnected factors. I could not get away to be with him. My sister and Peter, or my sister alone, were no longer available. That slap apart, Rachel had marital difficulties and she had breast cancer. Peter was frightened of his uncle. Work on the Barn slowed after foreman Vicenc returned to Estonia to care for his ill mother. It was hard to replace him. There were tensions between Francis and the architect Simon over a miscalculation of the strength of a steel joist. The house sale in Islington foundered and the process had to begin again with a new buyer. Percy was no longer crossing the plateau of his illness towards another stage. He had set up home on the heights and was not budging, not declining. There was nothing progressive about his condition. This was who he was, sometimes angry, sometimes childlike, always demanding, occasionally loveable. I remained determined to keep him at home. I could manage, just about. Francis and I emailed every day and continued to meet at least twice a week in the lane out the back as he detoured from his Barn business on outward and return journeys.
Brazenly, I tried incorporating Francis into my domestic life and on four occasions he came into the house. He was introduced as a colleague from college, not that Percy could have held that or any other of my lies in mind for long. Francis brought presents each time, including a pocket screen loaded with Disney cartoons. Percy loved it but did not remember for long how he came by it. He remained suspicious of Francis, then rude, and on the final visit a touch aggressive, so we gave up. Our erotic horizon shrank to kisses in the car, but mostly we held hands and talked. Perhaps it was good for us. I liked to think we came to know each other better than many lovers do. Our sessions were always short, for I could not leave Percy alone for long. We did not waste time. Our conversations were urgent and to the point. Francis talked about the love poems he had written in the weeks after our Islington time. He read them to me in the car and left various drafts. I made suggestions, some of which, to my surprise, he accepted. He spoke about the oppression of fame, the constant demands on his time, the good causes that would not let him go, the careless promises he made that ‘come back to bite me’. Retreating to the quiet valley would be his way out. He expected his work to move into new territory and he was impatient to begin. He talked often of how it would be when we lived together at the Barn. There would be herbs growing in earthenware pots outside the kitchen. We would have poultry and eat fresh eggs for breakfast. I always felt guilt, but I could not help myself, I joined in and told him how I would love to be feeding the hens each morning. These exchanges were a delightful form of escapism.
I told Francis about my plans for a book I’d had in mind for years. It would be a well-illustrated life of Thomas Aikenhead, the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Britain. He was a highly gifted twenty-year-old Scot, whose eloquent and heartfelt apologies for questioning the existence of God could not save him from the granite authority of the Presbyterian Kirk – and, in 1697, the gallows. His case gratified some, outraged others. My book would explore the religious and intellectual turmoil of the late seventeenth century. Francis was encouraging, though he had never heard of Aikenhead. The converted dairy, Francis said, would be just the place to write such a book.
This period of stasis between us lasted months. But there were other developments. The Islington house was sold, but for less than Francis had expected. The proceeds of sale went to settle the Barn debts. Francis was broke. When my unpaid sabbatical ended, I resigned from my college. Someone fresh, not a series of part-timers, should be hired to take on my load. The man who had tried to take away the little boy on the station platform was found guilty of a separate offence and his picture was in the national press. When I had seen him last, he was being driven to a police cell. The following day he was returned to prison for breaking the terms of his parole. For the new offence he was sent down for a further six years. I took Percy to see the neurologist, who thought his patient was ‘doing just fine’ apart from being less steady in his movements. He had developed a tentative gait, as though he could not trust the ground under his feet. Apart from that, little change.
Whatever it was that began to shift came on slowly and at first I thought low spirits were distorting my judgement. I began to think that Francis was having a change of heart. My anxieties would come on in the small hours when I should have been sleeping in preparation for Percy’s early-morning starts. The emails Francis sent were shorter, less inventive. He was subdued in our meetings in the lane, his tone was flatter. He had cancelled twice. He kissed me only at our hellos and goodbyes. He was behaving as I would if I were seeing someone else. With these thoughts, our project, our life beyond the unnameable ceased to be a pleasant fantasy. It became a lifeline, sensible, necessary, profoundly desirable.
I intended to confront him but once he was beside me in the car, I couldn’t do it. I was frightened of having my suspicions confirmed, and if I was wrong, I risked angering him or even driving him away. But one afternoon, while Percy was absorbed in a TV drama about sheepdogs and the rain was coming down heavily, swelling the clay puddles and hammering on the car’s roof, Francis told me without prompting. He laid matters out in the correct order. First, he loved me. Second, he knew my situation was truly awful. Third, everything was stalled between us and it was hard for him too. So, yes, he was having a fling, more than one, and he thought it was right that I should know. I could not stop nodding at each of these items. I was neither wretched nor furious. I was making calculations. A fling that could not threaten our love was merely a first stage. It could be an accurate description of a changing situation. One of those flings could blossom and meanwhile I was nailed in place, unable to oppose the process or give anything to the relationship. But all I said was, ‘I see.’
We listened to the thunderous rain. I assumed he was waiting for me to say more, but I was wrong. He was preparing to pronounce what at first sounded like the inevitable notice of termination. He raised his voice against the downpour.
‘Vivien, you must have thought this through as well. We don’t dare talk about it. We thought your sister would be on hand. Now she isn’t. You tell me that Percy’s crossing a plateau. What happens when he gets to the far side and goes into serious decline? How are you going to manage?’
‘I’ve told you. Health visitors, three times a day. It’s a free service. I can get help with nights too. He needs to stay in familiar surroundings.’
‘He could live for years. Dorothy Wordsworth was nuts for twenty before she died. Are we going to keep doing this for twenty years? Meeting in my car?’
I said, ‘If you want to move on, then do it. I’m not going to argue about it.’
‘I’m not moving on. I love you. We’re in love. We’re staring at an amazing existence together in a beautiful place. Inches away from paradise, but we can’t touch it. It’s clear to me and it should be to you.’
‘Meaning?’
He paused and looked away. ‘He has to go into care.’
That again. I spoke as if to a child. ‘You know I’ve been back. He came with me. I’m not putting him in there. Or any place like it.’
‘As you’ve said.’
‘I don’t have the money for private care. I can hardly pay the mortgage here. And you’re broke.’
‘Exactly.’
The rain was easing off and I was able to lower my voice. ‘So what’s your point?’
‘It’s this.’ He too lowered his voice, but to a fraction above a whisper and repeated slowly, ‘We have to act.’
He spread his hands as he said this. Seconds passed before I understood him. When I did, I laughed like an inept actor in a terrible amateur play. Looking into his eyes, I saw he was serious. I felt a chill in my legs rising and spreading into my gut. A bad smell, my own, appropriately sulphurous, filled the small space.
I said, ‘Ridiculous. Disgusting. No.’ And again, ‘Francis, no!’
‘You won’t have to do anything, I promise you.’
I laughed again. I was so nervous, so horrified that I didn’t know if I could stop.
He added, ‘Face it. Percy has a lot of suffering ahead of him.’
For the second time, mid-conversation with Francis in his car, I felt for the door release. Getting away from him was all I could think of.
He put a hand on my forearm to restrain me. ‘I want you to listen to what I’m saying. It’s either-or. We act, or we part, however much it hurts. I can’t tolerate any more of this, and I promise you, if you agree, all the risks will be mine.’
When I got out of his car, I did not pause to close the door behind me. I hurried through our gate, bolted it and ran across the garden, past Percy’s shed and into the house.
*
Around 4 a.m., during a long night of insomnia, I sat up in bed and wrote an email to my sister. Not to my real sister, who was ill, but to the phantom sister of my turbulent thoughts.
Dear Rachel,
Three days ago, Francis Blundy kindly offered to murder Percy, promising no risk to myself, so that we can go and live together out at his country place. Sensible plan? Any thoughts?
I did not put her name in the address field for fear of my finger accidentally touching the send button. Now I could see in summary, in typed letters rather than in my thoughts, how bizarre, how extreme the idea was. My sardonic or jokey tone was self-protection. I did not want those words too long on my screen in case some form of electronic palimpsest developed that I could never erase. Lady Macbeth’s damned spot. Over and over, my eyes travelled along the lines and back to the beginning. The more I read, the more implicated I became. The message was now stupid and dull and … I struggled for the word. Less frightening? No. Normalised . My typed words drew me into a simple pain-saving arrangement, a form of rational extralegal euthanasia. I could not go to the police. I was already party to murderous intent. Too late to phone them now and I never would.
I positioned the cursor by the final full stop, kept my forefinger on the back button and erased the message word by word. As soon as my email vanished, my thoughts swayed dizzily. I wanted the message back. It had steadied me, it concentrated the issue, it reminded me of what was wrong, and therefore, of what was right. Staring into the screen I saw, or imagined I saw, the faintest impression of the word ‘sensible’. I did not dare type the email again. Computers were routinely hacked, by governments as well as by fraudsters. Besides, for some reason, I could not recall the vaguely comic way I had set the matter out for my sister.
I moved heavily through the week, unable to think of much else, stunned by lack of sleep, more irritable than usual with Percy. I did not write to Francis, nor did I hear from him. He was waiting for my decision. Even to withhold it in writing, I supposed, would implicate me. As far as I knew, there were complex definitions around the legal concept of conspiracy. I had to be careful. But like an idiot, I missed him. Months of talking in his car had brought him closer to me. He was my best friend, best confidant, the brother I never had in Sam. I could have written and blandly suggested that we meet up. I resisted because I was also frightened of him, of his ability to talk me into something crazed and loathsome. I developed a theory that his ‘we have to act’ was an expression of sexual frustration. If only we could have made love. I had discovered in him that surprising element of sexual surrender, submissiveness even, an element that he would never acknowledge. No need, as long as we were physically close and it was an unspoken secret between us. I recalled reading that Hemingway in later life had sexual fantasies of being a little girl in a frilly white frock. He was dressed that way as a small child. Hunting rifle or deep-sea fishing rod in hand, his urge was to be in command. Likewise, Francis, behind the wheel of his car, fully clothed and safely distanced from the erotic, unthinkingly assumed power over me. If we could have spent time in bed, some form of balance could be reinstated. Together we might be reasonable. It crossed my mind that if we ever lived together without sex, he would crush me.
But Rachel, who had been about to come over at last and relieve me, was in hospital again. Peter had written an affectionate note in extravagant copperplate and seemed to have forgotten the slap. He would come as soon as his mother was feeling better. Among my academic friends there was no one I could trust to be with Percy for the night. His musician friends had dropped away. We were alone together, but not in the same way as before. Even as I rejected it, Francis’s proposal lay between Percy and me, almost invisible, like a polished sheet of glass. I felt horror and guilt, then sudden tenderness like an electric charge, or occasionally, an eerie sense of distance from him as if he was already gone – I could use no other word – and he was appearing before me like a vivid memory. I had to turn away and compose myself.
The dull rhythm of these days was interrupted by a sad outing, but it was social at least and involved a journey. My dear friend Martha MacLeish, the brilliant scholar of contemporary French literature, died peacefully at home. She had held out longer than her doctors had predicted and during that time, bedridden, often in pain, had written some fine monographs and completed her translations of lesser-known essays by Simone de Beauvoir. I had often been out to see her before Percy became ill, and we had talked for hours and even laughed at some old stories. Now he and I were making the journey together, bus to Oxford station, local train to Martha’s village, taxi to the village church. I needed to reassure Percy several times that we were not going to look at a hotel. Apart from that, he was content to stare out the window.
Many academic colleagues were there, gathered in knots among the graves, waiting to go in. It touched me that at least half the congregation was French. We were an irreligious crowd, but conventional in our acceptance of what must be gone through. It often happened when a faithless friend died without leaving instructions, church rituals were the default, and the godless living were relieved. We lustily sang the improbable words of the familiar hymns and listened to the likeable vicar evoke the everlasting bliss of the afterlife which Martha was beginning now. How we would have loved it to be true. But it was soothing to hear someone appear to believe that it was waiting for us all. Percy was unusually well behaved. He sat and stood in time with everyone else, sang the hymns and even knew some of the words. Those memories were laid down long ago and not yet lost. Martha’s family had asked four of us to address the congregation. I was first to mount the carved oak pulpit. I spoke of her courage, her impish sense of humour and her brilliant scholarship. While the others, including a poised twelve-year-old granddaughter, gave their speeches, my thoughts wandered.
Each time I passed through that rural station on my way to Martha’s house, difficult memories of Christopher had returned. It was not the fear that came back, nor did I think much about the sudden improbable appearance of the police. It was the moment of my arrival and my first sight of the boy at the end of the platform, near the red sign that warned passengers off the concrete slope that descended to the tracks. In memory, the landscape was vast, towering above his minute form as he stared, with his back to me, at the distant tunnel through which his mother had vanished. He craved the return of the love of his life. He could have no grasp of how lost and helpless she herself was in the face of real and imagined problems. What I felt now in church and whenever I had passed through that station was a longing to comfort the abandoned boy, draw him onto my lap, hold him in my arms and ask his forgiveness. Squashed into the front row of pews with friendly strangers, no one knew that my tears were not for Martha but for my lost girl who would have been my lifelong friend, in her early twenties now, at the dawn of her exciting adult life. The boy on the platform was her sad emissary, her brother come to make me reckon again for what I did.
Two days after the funeral, there was a development that in my haunted state seemed like an extension of my punishment. In his sleep Percy crapped copiously in his bed. Cleaning him up and sorting out the bedding took more than half the night. By 4 a.m. he was determined to be up and dressed and eating a cooked breakfast. He wanted to phone someone, though he was not sure who. He insisted on going out for a walk. He wanted all three at once and was distressed in his confusion. After that, his sleep routines went to pieces and mine, already fragile, went with them. Gradually, a new pattern set in. He was asleep by seven or eight in the evening, then awake and ready to be up and dressed between two and three in the night. On one occasion, I was about to get up with him, then fell asleep to be woken later by the police bringing him home. Another time, local search and rescue volunteers brought him back. With two or three hours’ sleep a night, I entered a dream state in which it was sometimes an effort to grasp what was real. Hallucinated objects, people and landscapes drifted on the edge of vision. Snatches of dreams invaded my waking experience. My heart often skipped a beat, then landed with a thump that made me clutch at my chest. I could be on my feet, sleeping for seconds at a time. It was easier for me to give in to every demand Percy made. When he shook me awake at 3 a.m. to tell me that he wanted to go out for a walk, it was less stressful to get up and go with him and avoid making tea at 5 a.m. for the search and rescue team.
It was foolish of me to resume emails to Francis, bleak descriptions that were also self-pitying complaints, pleas for help, expressions of despair. His replies were loving. At least we were back in touch. When he asked me to book an appointment at a particular private care home twenty miles away, I assumed he had come into some money, and I complied. I could not ask Rachel for help because she was undergoing radical surgery. I sent her fruit and flowers and goodwill messages. It was not clear to me if Percy was finally descending from his plateau and was in free fall, or if this was a temporary dip in a level terrain. None of it mattered. All I needed to do was keep going. Certain everyday duties helped. We still went out together to the shops. The kitchen had to be tidied, the cooking and laundry seen to. I thought I could fall in with Percy’s new sleep pattern. But by the early evening I was jaggedly alert, beyond sleep, incapable of anything apart from writing to Francis again.
I could not recall how long this ghostly period lasted. In memory it squatted across months, and this is where the journals have helped. There were few entries, but the dates are clear. It was forty-three days. The differences blurred between an intention and the memory of a completed act, between imagining and knowing, hoping and having, and finally, I suppose, between right and wrong. The date for the care-home visit came, but Percy refused to go near ‘another hotel’. I did not have the strength of purpose to persuade or force him. I phoned the place to apologise and the kindly voice of the receptionist made me tearful. When I told Francis that we had missed the appointment, he did not seem to care.
A week later, at around ten in the evening, I was in the kitchen, sitting at the hinged Formica-topped table I kept there for tea and coffee equipment. Percy was asleep. I had been upstairs half an hour before to check on him. I was not reading or even thinking. I was in my customary daze, too hot in the head to go to bed, too worn out to write another email or start on the dishes and pans piled by the sink. If I had heard the back garden gate opening, I would not have stirred. My indifference was profound. But when I heard tapping on a pane of the French windows, I was startled and turned and saw in the dark the faint sketch of a face. When I let Francis in, we did not embrace. He was wearing leather gloves and a black wide-brimmed hat I had never seen before. He looked unwell. There was a hint of blueish green about his pallor. Perhaps he hadn’t shaved. He was carrying a cloth shoulder bag. It was odd, but I was not surprised to see him.
I said stupidly, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Where is he?’
‘Asleep. Where are you going?’
‘I want you to stay here.’
It should have been obvious where he was going and what he was about to do. I was in a state of stupefaction, of vegetative slowness. More than half a minute passed before I moved. I tried to hurry but my legs were heavy and wouldn’t respond. It was as if I was wading thigh-deep in treacle. I would have had a hard time explaining myself. If my mind was such a blank, why had I stood up, why was I trying to hurry? Something was about to happen that I knew I had to prevent. No one would believe that I knew and, simultaneously, did not know, or preferred not to. Logic dissolved. I got myself out of the kitchen and as I was going along the passageway towards the stairs I heard voices. Francis was saying something to Percy, who called out my name, though not in an anxious way. As I reached the foot of the stairs, Percy was coming down them, head first, arms outstretched towards me, his mouth open in silent terror as he hurtled down the straight run. Instinctively, I leaped out of his way when I should have tried to catch him. I heard his head strike the floor and he slumped face down on the tiles. Francis hurried down behind him. Before I could move or speak, he was kneeling by Percy’s head and I thought he was coming to his aid. Did I really think that? He pulled from his shoulder bag not a first-aid kit but a squat hammer, a short-handled metal mallet. And I dared to be surprised. He grabbed a handful of hair and jerked Percy’s head up. I shouted Francis’s name, but I didn’t move. He brought the mallet down hard onto or into Percy’s forehead. It was a deep muffled thump, but edged with a finer sound, a filigree of delicate rupture.
What should I have done? Locked the front door and kitchen French windows, called the police, kept Francis in the house until they arrived? Nothing crossed my mind. Not even the fact that I would be seen to be implicated and was trapped. I could only watch. Francis eased the mallet into a black plastic sack and shoved it in the bag. He bent over Percy, turning his face down in the puddle of blood that was now spreading fast in two long fingers. Francis stood with difficulty, stepped over the blood and came in front of me. He was shaking.
‘He’s dead. Listen. Vivien, are you listening? Look at me. You’re to delete all my emails, to me, from me, yes? And from any back-up you have. You’ve also got my letters. Destroy them. Are you listening? Don’t contact me. Give me five minutes, then phone an ambulance. Not the police. Have you got all that? Bolt the back gate and lock the kitchen door. Remember, it’s going to be all right.’
He did not look as if he believed that, and he did not wait for a response. He went towards the kitchen. Something smashed on the floor. He had collided with the table and knocked over a plate. I heard the French windows open and close. I remained standing there, ten feet from where poor Percy lay. I should have gone to him, but I was a coward and did not dare, in case he was really dead. In case he was still alive. All I could think of was how I, dim subordinate, was supposed to know when five minutes were up. When were we counting from? I could make no sense of my wristwatch, which seemed to be upside down. I waited, staring at Percy on the floor, hoping to see him move, dreading that he might, trying to remember the other instructions Francis had given me. When I looked at my watch again, I thought the hands had gone backwards.
*
We did not communicate for seven months. My agony – the horror, self-loathing and despair, the crying in front of my sister, sympathetic friends and strangers – were taken by all, policemen, medics and a local journalist included, as the pitiful grief they would expect of the bereaved. No need to pretend. I hid and wept and lost weight in plain sight and was taken for the virtuous widow, the devoted wife who had given away everything, career, society, comfort for the care of her tragically afflicted husband. Some of which was true and that is where I crouched, behind the boulder of my apparent goodness. No one needed to know that what had paralysed me on the night was my disgusting ambivalence. I loved Percy and wanted him alive, and I had seen paradise in a green valley and wanted to escape the drudgery to be there with my lover. But that was not quite right. I loved Francis and the green valley, but I would never have murdered for them. My affair with him was an open secret, known to a few colleagues and, of course, to Harry Kitchener. No one thought it was relevant. No one came to the house to examine my computer and find buried in the software the traces of deleted emails to and from a famous poet. No crafty cop came to poke about in the fireplace for the black remains of Francis Blundy’s letters.
Tipping forwards and falling down the stairs was a common cause of death. The elderly as well as drug-addled pop stars and drunks were at it daily. An Alzheimer’s case, medically observed and noted with compromised motor skills, merely joined the queue on any first-floor landing, as though among jostling kids at the top of a playground slide. The examining pathologist in the basement of the John Radcliffe Hospital knew before he reached for his whining craniotome that the deceased’s head injuries were commensurate with a heavy man tripping and, under gravity’s pitiless law, colliding with uneven floor tiles. As for the sickening precautions Francis took, the wide-brimmed hat to fool a CCTV camera, gloves to mask his fingerprints, his car parked two miles away outside a busy fish and chip shop, a mallet brought along in case Percy was still alive after he was thrown down the stairs, the same mallet tossed into the brown Cherwell River near the Vicky Arms, a recorded intention to place Percy in a good care home – all of it, self-dramatising nonsense. No one came looking. No one cared. The official verdict of death by misadventure was no surprise. I along with the health visitor were mildly reprimanded in court by the coroner – the second in my life – for not acting sooner to make a downstairs bedroom for Percy. Future carers take note.
I was free to writhe in self-disgust. There was nothing I could do in my torment that did not evoke sympathy and kindness in those around me. When I was alone, without that comfort, I became mad. The nights were the worst, forcing me onto an obsessive narrow track down which I ran to escape blame: Francis said we had to act. I said no, not with my lips but with my heart. My silence as I got out of his car and fled to the house was my no. He said we had to act, but I did not act. I made no plans. That was my no. I did not put a hammer in a cloth bag and step out into the night. I would never have harmed Percy. I cared for him, I loved him, gave up my life, cut up his food, took him to the doctor’s and made notes, tuned his TV, made his bedtimes fun, sang songs with him, changed his sheets, cleaned his shed, kept him from the care home and the bingo afternoons. In the dark I perfected my lists and my innocence and always arrived at the same question – when would I ever rest? In my delirium the answer was plain. Blundy, like Shakespeare’s Glamis, had murdered sleep.
My sister was so kind to me. We spoke every day and she came to stay for a week to help clear the house of Percy’s possessions, his shirts and shoes and luthier tools. I thought it would help me and it didn’t. Three months passed. I would never have guessed that continuing grief and self-hatred would force on me such a craving for sex. Widow’s Fire, it’s called. I came to resemble an ocean-floor mollusc of soft interior, open wide to every drifting titbit. There were some humiliating episodes before I landed back with Harry. By then, Francis had gone to Princeton to fill in for an ailing poet. Harry had turned up one early evening with a bottle of wine and a decent intent to commiserate. He was genuinely surprised by my needs, but he was a man of the world, and his willingness and emotional distance were what I needed. In the dance-like formality of a sexual embrace, I found brief respite from myself. We did not dwell on past hostilities, his callous rejection of me, my studied revenge. Some problems are best solved by moving on. I didn’t ask him about his current lover. I didn’t care. We resumed our pleasant banter – gossip and books, though I had not read much and mostly listened, or pretended to. He came once or twice a week. As soon as he was gone, I would forget about him and go back on my narrow track.
Grief is a dream-state. The linear markers of ordinary time and daily obligations are wrenched apart. All significant ties lead to the recent past, to a sudden absence and to a struggle with what could or should have been. There’s a sameness to the days which accelerates their passing, and a sameness in the pattern of memories that makes them unbearable even as they must be visited again and again. That was my condition as I was passively borne along through a Christmas and an extended winter and a cold spring.
Finally, the poet phoned. He was calling from Holland, his teaching duties in the States were over and he suggested a holiday together in Greece. He named an island and I, walled up in my indifference, tonelessly agreed to meeting him on a quayside in Piraeus, by or on the boat that would take us to the island of Amorgos.
It took me many hours to find my passport. To me, Greece was merely a word, an agreement and a meeting point. I had been a few times and loved it, but those visits were not on my mind. I was not capable of anticipating pleasure. My object was to find out if I could bear to be in the company of Francis Blundy. Harry, with his usual grip on double standards, was irritated when I told him. That meant nothing to me and I refused to engage with him. But I could have just as easily stayed at home. If Francis had phoned to cancel, I would not have cared.
*
I had underestimated Greece. As I wheeled my luggage from my taxi along the quay to the boat, the warmth, the din and excitement of the early season’s tourist crowd, the glint between the docked ferries of a flat blue sea and a whiff from somewhere of fish frying in olive oil stirred in me a self I had forgotten. To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small. I fairly bounced up the gangway. Francis was waiting for me at the top. We embraced lightly. He looked calm and well – and taller. Conceivably, I had shrunk. I learned from him in our first thirty minutes that the boat journey would take eight hours and he had tactfully booked single occupancy of two first-class double cabins; that an American arts foundation had given him a large sum of money in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement; that the Barn and dairy were finished to the highest quality, the books were in order on the shelves, spices and wine in their racks, sheets piled in the walk-in linen cupboard and the garden soon to flourish; that he had yet to spend a night there, and everyone who saw the place was amazed. I made no response, but I watched him closely as he spoke and could not suppress or deny a faint beginning of my old feelings for him. As we walked up and down the deck, or stopped to watch passengers boarding, I delighted in the afternoon sun on my bare arms and felt capable, given life’s brevity, of ruthless insistence on my small share of the world’s pleasures. I had suffered and I was owed. I was giddy with the thought that I could take what I wanted, on my own terms. No one was watching but Francis, and he was complicit and treacherous too. Far-off England was the cold locus of ungenerous morals and disapproval, and Oxford was its damp heartland from which I had been sprung. The boat was leaving. As we stood in the stern, leaning on the taffrail, looking out towards open sea with the sun and a warm breeze on our faces, I felt so exhilarated that I did what I had told myself I would not do, or not yet. I put my hand on his. He took it, we interlinked our fingers and we kissed.
In the dining room that evening we ate a lukewarm stew of lamb and okra. The red wine, almost black, had a sharp invigorating taste. Francis thought it was how the ancient Greeks and Romans liked it. In all that we talked about – Iraq, Rachel’s illness, American universities, Oxford’s expansion, British versus American poetry, Peter’s brilliant school reports – we did not go near Percy’s death and its aftermath. We did not even collude to avoid it. The conversation flowed past it. The matter – the murder – was buried. The many months I had passed in mourning I forgot in the excitement of a sea voyage. Francis wanted to talk about the Barn and was assuming that our life together there was assured. He had bought for the dairy an eighteenth-century oak writing desk and was certain I would love working on it. He showed me a picture on his phone. A kitchen designer based in Suffolk had built for the Barn a huge kitchen island out of elm. It reminded Francis that the housekeeper’s husband had planted on the garden’s boundary two elms immune to disease. And so, without acknowledging what we were doing, we sealed Percy in his tomb, or so we thought. The last time Francis and I had seen each other, he had a bag on his shoulder in which was concealed a mallet smeared with blood. A corpse was on the floor. With what ease we conspired not to return there. What an achievement.
It could not last. Later, we kissed goodnight and without discussion went to our adjacent rooms. As I saw it, we were not ready to resume our affair because we knew how monstrous our evasions had been. Soothed by gentle motion and the drone of the ship’s engines, I was asleep in minutes for the first time in months. I woke from a dreamless sleep in the middle of the night. Only when I heard a car’s horn and a shout did I realise that the ferry had docked. We had arrived at the port of Aegiali in the early hours of the morning. As we came down the gangway in the pre-dawn gloom, we found that the hotel had sent a man with donkey and cart to take our suitcases and those of four other guests. It was a gimmick to please the tourists, I guessed, but it worked some magic on me as we walked uphill behind the cart through silent narrow alleys. There was a widening along the way, a tiny plaza with a pollarded plane tree by a whitewashed church. Here the carter stopped to chat with a very elderly man, possibly his father. The guests were obliged to wait. In that southern European way, our man, oblivious to time, seemed to forget about us. I was right behind the cart. Francis was several paces back, talking animatedly to the others. He had read up on Amorgos and knew it all, the poetry of Nikos Gatsos which he quoted, the geology, microclimate, mythology, and the local politics of building the road that connected Aegiali with the other port, Katapola, at one end of this thin island with, as Francis explained, a fishtail-shaped coast. His listeners obliged with questions. He answered with casual authority, as if he had lived his entire life here. I did not know how he could have absorbed so much from a couple of guidebooks, and why was he so determined to impress. Or why – this was a measure of my irritable state – he was not talking to me. The joy of elsewhere fell away. I was hot from the walk, thirsty, annoyed at being made to wait, impatient to be asleep again before the sun was up. At last, the fellow called to his donkey and the cart rolled forwards. Francis talked all the way up to the hotel. I tried hard not to listen.
Now we were sharing a room, but there were twin beds, at least, narrow and hard. Above mine was a little black scorpion halfway up the wall. I wanted it eased into a tooth mug and put out the window. Francis hit it hard with the heel of his shoe, leaving a yellow stain where it had clung. It fell on my pillow. I brushed it off and turned the pillow over. Then I got ready for bed at speed, pulled the sheet over my head and pretended to be asleep, ignoring Francis when he asked sweetly if I was OK.
When I woke, my mood had not improved. The bedroom was oppressively bright, and Francis was not in his bed. I heard his voice in the garden below our open window. I was dressed and sitting on a stool adjusting a sandal when he appeared, energetic and loud, and began to tell me how he had arranged for our breakfast to be in the perfect spot in the shade of an orange tree. It was ready now. Then he caught my look.
‘What’s up?’
I had already decided to let him have it. No more evasion, but I wanted to sound airily sardonic. ‘I’m fine. Just finding it a trifle awkward sharing a room with the man who killed my husband.’
‘What?’ He spat the word out, then did it again, even louder. ‘What?’ He couldn’t help himself, he glanced towards the window. I think I did too. We could hear guests at breakfast in the garden. They could hear us. He crossed the room quickly and slammed it shut. Now we were sealed in and ready.
He stood facing me, arms crossed. ‘I can’t believe you mean that.’
‘You’re planning on spending this time not talking about it. Too bad. You’re going to have to face it.’
He pulled up a painted wooden chair and sat down. His pretence of calm did not fool me. He said, ‘Fine. Let’s talk. About your responsibilities too. Or should we leave them out?’
‘Francis, you came to my place without warning. You didn’t speak to me. You just went for him.’
He was gazing at me in feigned wonder. ‘You’ve really persuaded yourself, haven’t you.’
‘What was I supposed to do? Wrestle you to the ground?’
‘My God. You are weak.’
‘You mean I don’t murder people.’
He laughed. ‘No. You get me to do it.’
At this point we spoke at once. I was enraged by his lie. ‘What fucking nonsense. How dare you.’ And keeping up his appearance of composure, and surely struggling not to swear like me, he said something like, ‘Do you want me to spell it out for you, what you did?’
‘You acted on your own. You know it.’
‘Do you want to see the proof?’
‘What?’
‘Let me speak. Then I’ll listen, I promise. I put it to you in the car. You knew what I meant. Don’t deny it. You didn’t answer. Fine. Then what? You’re sending me ten emails a day. He shat himself, he keeps me awake all night, I can’t cope, I’m losing my mind. I hate him. He’s sucking the life out of me. But I’m never ever putting him in a home. You told me that a thousand times. After what I said in the car, your meaning was clear. Why else write to tell me that you wished he was dead? Or that he was “already” dead? Remember? I said we had to act and here you were, agreeing with me. I said you needn’t be involved and on the night you weren’t. I did the hard bit and you didn’t make a sound. So now, instead of cleaning up his shit on your own and waiting years for him to die, here you are on a beautiful island. But there’s a price for that, Vivien. It’s simple. We’re in this together.’
He sat back, resting his hands on his knees, staring at me solemnly, waiting for me to speak. I had to be careful. He was a clever man and he could twist lies into truth. But he had aimed at the centre of my guilt. I should have done more to stop him. I felt sick, my heart was thudding, but I was determined to match his show of calm. At the same time, I wondered if I was going through the motions and whether my heart was really in this argument any longer. Logic could take us in another direction.
‘I never asked you to come round to my place with a hammer. Oh yes, I was going through a very hard time looking after him. That’s every carer’s experience with Alzheimer’s. What you said in the car and what you did next were your choices. All yours. He was an inconvenience and you killed him. You couldn’t understand how I could love him. To make out you were only doing what you were told is desperate, it’s pathetic. And you call me weak! You murdered him, Francis. You bashed in his brains! You, not me. If I hadn’t met you, he’d still be alive.’
I had worked myself up to shouting and I felt a curious elation.
Francis was impassive. ‘If Percy hadn’t met you , he’d still be alive. But look, let’s not waste time. Anyone could ask you why you didn’t go to the police right at the start, why you let me in, why you told me where he was, why you didn’t try to stop me when I went upstairs, why you didn’t call the police when it was done. Forget all that. Let’s agree to differ, or even say for the sake of argument that you’re entirely innocent and I’m the monster. What matters is this. If I go down, so do you. Sorry, but I thought we might have a conversation like this. I kept your emails. They don’t look good. To repeat – we’re in this together.’
Before Francis reached his concluding proposal of blackmail, I had begun to think and feel differently. I had known for months that we were roped together. A clean break would be problematic, assuming I wanted it. If I did, I should not have been on holiday with him. If he had a hold over me, then I had one over him. Also, I was no longer young, I had no money, my career had collapsed, the thought of resuming life in Headington was hateful to me. A studio and an oak writing desk were waiting, so was my book about Aikenhead. Beyond the dairy lay open spaces. I recalled my notion of the day before: ruthless insistence on my share of the world’s pleasures. Francis had the glow of talent and fame about him and a million dollars from his American benefactors. In the longer term, he was likely to predecease me. The Barn would be mine. But these enticements were tributaries to a darker stream of thought. There was an element of my own personality I had only discovered late in life, thanks to Harry Kitchener’s duplicity. My bitterness over Percy might persist. I might need, well, if not revenge … just then I did not know what I might need.
I smiled at Francis and stood, hesitated a moment, then went across the room to the window and opened it wide. Leaning out into the warmth, I saw it straight away in the spangled shade of an orange tree already heavy with fruit, our green table bearing a pot of coffee, thick-sliced bread, early figs, yoghurt and honey in earthenware bowls. Across the garden the cicadas were starting up their hypnotic buzz and a waiter was coming with a cloth to protect our delayed breakfast from the birds. I turned to look back into the room. Francis was watching me with interest.
Resuming the conversation, I said, ‘Well, in that case we had better get married.’
*
In September 2007 Francis published his twelfth book, Feasting . Turnbull’s threw a party for him at the Wallace Collection, Marylebone. Harry, as editor, gave an amusing speech. After our four-month resumption during those dark days of bereavement, he and I were getting along nicely. The launch was a grand affair, unusual by the standards of poetry publishing – eighty guests, champagne, a jazz quintet, a sit-down dinner presented by the River Cafe. Feasting included the cycle of love poems that Francis wrote after our Islington idyll. One of those, funny, lyrical and erotic, found its way into a movie, a romantic comedy, one of the big hits of the autumn season. Beautifully read by Francis for a voiceover during a love scene on a train, it caught the public mood. Tens of thousands, who had never bought a volume of poetry and especially not a hardback, picked up a copy in cinema foyers across the country and propelled the book onto the bestseller lists, among the murder and SAS novels. Francis was in a strange state, torn between exhilaration at this new form of celebrity and contempt for his new readers who had never heard of him and would soon forget him. But the serious press gave him the best notices he’d ever had. Looking back, I would say that Feasting was the peak of his career.
I was in a strange state too. This suddenly famous poem and the others in the cycle were about me. I knew the sequence from the typed pages Francis gave me as soon as he had finished. Eighteen months later, I was shocked to see in the bound proof that I was named and surnamed as the dedicatee in italics above the first of the nine poems. My body and my ‘inward’ temperament were also named. A mole on my thigh was itemised, and the rising notes of my ‘lyrical’ laughter, and what he called my ‘tasty lisp’, which I never knew I had. When I asked if it was a typo for ‘lips’ Francis smiled forgivingly. So it was me, it was him and me in our most private of moments, sliced open and pinned wide for public inspection, like a dissected frog in my long-ago school biology lessons. I did not complain, and later I was glad I hadn’t, for this was a vanishing process. It was me when I saw the proof, then me and not me when I saw my first finished copy, until finally, diluted and disseminated in multiple thousands of printed versions of myself, I faded into the typeface, and it was no longer me at all. What remained was not even a woman but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination. The cycle became well known to readers of contemporary poetry and later was ravishingly set for tenor and string orchestra by Michael Berkeley. Francis and I were at the world premiere at the Maltings, Aldeburgh. We were both in tears. That was the night we were at our closest.
There exists an unregarded entanglement of memory and physical distance. Looking back at the so-called ‘Second Immortal Dinner’ from the remoteness of north-west Scotland, the images and sequence of events leading up to it are blurred not only by time but also by 500 miles. From up here, what happened down there years ago matters less. Jane finds the same. Our detachment has allowed us to tell each other almost everything. I have told her about my affair with her husband, Harry, now deceased. She has told me of her loathing for my husband, her brother, Francis, now deceased. We have tramped the wilderness of the Rough Bounds and talked of little else. We are both fit for our age, still good for fifteen miles. We have approved of each other’s plans. Harry’s archive has been moved to Fort William, where there is an annexe of the University of the Highlands and Islands. So far, no one has been to look at his papers. She has wanted my help, over time and successive visits, to smuggle his papers out and replace them with blank sheets or any old typed or handwritten pages we can find. I feel ashamed of my part in this, but I promised to be of use, and I understand her need to protect the family’s privacy. Harry made a fool of her over many years and neglected his children – with some assistance from me. We’ve made eight visits between us in two years. We have reader’s tickets to the archive, which is run to the highest standards. We fit our larceny expeditions around occasional shopping trips to Fort William. Our methods have become refined. Inconsequential stuff of Harry’s is left at the top of the piles in the document boxes. Trash is smuggled in lower down. The stuff of interest is smuggled out. We go to the library separately, months apart. The archivist there is friendly towards us and doesn’t know we are connected. Sometimes I have seen through the kitchen window Jane standing at the bottom of the garden in contemplation of the bonfire, the funeral pyre, she is tending. She needs to be alone.
I have told her that in a month or so, the curtain will come down on this book. It will terminate at a moment six years ago, in the Barn’s dairy late at night, October 2014, with me, a glass of water in my hand, warming myself in front of the log-burning stove. Jane has been supportive of the project. I’ve read to her the parts of my memoir that do not intimately concern Harry or the details of Percy’s death. Is it, she asked me on two occasions, a novel? Each time, I shrugged.
I’ve explained to her a decision I’ve taken that’s eccentric, even ludicrous. To my relief she has been sympathetic. ‘We’re allowed to be eccentric,’ she assured me, ‘I’m afraid we’ve reached that age!’ It had started two years before, when I was thinking again about Percy’s ashes, which I’ve yet to scatter. Headington was not right, nor was north Oxford. I was favouring a place on one of our big walks, perhaps along the banks of the River Evenlode where we often saw kingfishers. Then I thought of the Barn itself, in the garden, near the dairy. He would have loved that protected valley and its stream. He deserved to be there. Francis would have objected, and that may have lent some appeal to the project. Out of that idea grew the thought, or the reverie, of sending Percy’s Guarneri violin into the future with an explanatory page or two describing its maker and how he would have wanted the instrument to end up one day in the possession of a fine professional player.
When I described these vague fantasies in a phone call to Peter, he was immediately interested, for he’d adored his uncle. We started talking about ‘time capsules’, popular at the time with primary-school teachers and their pupils. As a physicist, Peter wanted to tell me about the Voyager satellites, one of which crossed the outer boundaries of the solar system after many years, ‘golden’ records attached to its sides with recordings of music and voices from around the planet. Peter became deeply engaged in my violin proposal. I told him that I sensed his eleven-year-old self bubbling up. He was amused, but he was also serious, and before I knew it, he had been in touch with the Bodleian about preservation methods. That was when I began reviewing the options for this document. Leaving it with Turnbull’s or any other publisher with a thirty-year embargo was a risk. Once I am out of the way and new editors come in, curiosity would overwhelm contractual undertakings given to a forgotten elderly lady. Same was true for the Bodleian once the present leadership have retired. The Francis Blundy story is, for scholars at least, too interesting. I could deposit these pages with a legal firm, but I can never forget Thomas Hardy’s will. He wanted to be buried in the rural backwater of Stinsford in the grave of his beloved Emma. But after he died, his body was torn open so that his heart could remain with her, while his ashes went to Westminster Abbey. Perhaps I was getting crusty as I approached my sixtieth birthday, but I trusted no one.
Then, I thought, why not put these pages in with Percy’s violin, bury them deep and leave them to fate? If my efforts here are discovered while I’m still alive, I’ll take what’s coming to me. It could even be a relief. It was mere fantasy, but once I had told Peter, the matter slipped out of my control. He came to Glenuig to stay for a few days. He was persuasive, irresistible. When he left, he took with him the ashes and the violin. I told him the size of paper I’m using and the likely thickness of the document but, of course, I couldn’t tell him what was in it.
There have been times when I’ve wondered if this burial business is plain foolish. It’s an old-fashioned boy’s adventure. Treasure Island! There’s also a shadow of sadness across it. It took me too long to realise that I had done this before, long ago, when I went with Rachel and my housemates on a stormy day in June and tried to bury little Diana’s blue teddy in Spa Fields. This second burial might be more successful. Whatever it is, it’s too late to call it back now. The kindly conservator at the Bodleian, Geraldine Smythe, has been in touch several times and she has told me that her department is enthusiastic and ready for me. Thanks to her, I’ve already taken delivery of a ream of handmade cotton-based paper from Ruscombe Paper Mill.
When I’ve finished and made my corrections, I’ll start printing. Double-sided please, Peter says, and single-spaced. This cotton paper, I’m told, will outlast any modern equivalent in which the cellulose from wood pulp rapidly degrades. Now I have come this far and have accepted the inevitable, I enjoy thinking about our plans. Jane will drive me to the railway stop at Lochailort to catch the local train to Fort William where I’ll pick up the night train to Euston, then onwards from Paddington to Oxford. The Bodleian’s Librarian, the distinguished and genial Richard Ovenden, will be waiting for me in his office with lunchtime sandwiches and a glass of wine. There is bound to be much talk of Scotland. I will return to him my twelve journals which will go back into the Blundy archive. Afterwards, he will pass me on to Geraldine Smythe and I’ll hand over this document for the preservation treatment. She asked me on the phone how long I expected the items to be in the ground. I told her possibly as much as thirty years. She is taking no chances and has chosen oxygen-free storage. As she has explained, my items will be placed in an airtight container. The air will be pumped out to provide an environment hostile to all life forms. A secondary container will contain silica gels to create a microclimate and keep the humidity low.
Last week, Peter sourced a stainless-steel airtight case which he’ll bring to the Bodleian the day after I’ve arrived, and that too will be lined with various chemicals. When all is ready and the case has been sealed, we’ll set off in his car to the Barn. The tenants have already received their six-month notice and the place will be empty. I’ll record a map reference for the dairy and disguise it somehow in my journal, which will be my last. Peter will dig the hole while I show an estate agent round the Barn and dairy. If he asks, I’ll tell him we are burying our old Pomeranian, fresh out of the freezer. Once Peter has filled in the hole, we’ll pour the ashes over the bare earth then linger there a while to recall a few things we loved about Percy. I’ll read a consolatory poem by James Fenton which encourages the living to make friends with the dead. The site will grow over quickly – nettles like disturbed ground – and the property will go on the market. The proceeds will buy a new kiln for Jane and together with Francis’s occasional royalties should certainly see us both to our ends. I like to run through all these arrangements last thing at night. They ease me into sleep.
*
Time and distance have obscured my memory of the order of events after Amorgos, a time of arrangements and upheavals. I had to consult my journal entries to be reminded that I cleared the Headington house of junk, mostly mine, and the place went on sale. I had no money to smarten it up and I did not want to ask Francis. I took them personally, the negative comments of viewers. The garden was a mess, Percy’s shed blocked daylight from the ground floor, the heating system was worn out, the stairs were too steep. I dropped my price. About the same time, the university offered me my job back, but I was no longer interested. I wanted another life. My college, taking pity on a bereaved colleague, found me some part-time hours. I taught seventeenth-century poetry on Mondays and Victorian novels on Thursdays. The Barn was not as ready as Francis had thought. There were drainage and septic-tank problems that required the builders to come back and take up the floor. After many years, my John Clare book went into a second printing. That encouraged me to take out the Aikenhead notes. At the end of that year Francis and I were quietly married in Oxford Town Hall. I invited Rachel, Francis invited Jane and Harry – he was surprisingly relaxed about the wedding. The five of us had dinner out at Raymond Blanc’s restaurant in Great Milton. I have no memory of the occasion. Jane tells me that it was merry, and she remembers being relieved that Francis paid.
We had been married four months before I moved to the Barn and took possession of the dairy. Francis was determined that we should merge our book collections. It was a kindly ambition for total union, but I had my doubts. If life became intolerable, I thought, I might have to run for it. (Sure enough, twelve years later, after Francis died, separating my books from his to take to the little cottage in Scotland was a huge and dull task. I had to pay a graduate student to help me.) The idyll Francis and I had often imagined evaded us. The day I arrived in the removal van, it was raining hard and continued to rain for weeks. The wettest May on record. When I said carelessly that climate change was to blame, Francis set off on one of his fugues and a row followed, partly settled by a bottle of wine. The rain exposed several leaks in the Barn’s new roof. Francis spent time shouting down the phone at stolid Vicenc, who was on a new job seventy miles away and insisted that the ‘snagging’ period had ended long ago. The architect backed him up. A vile mood settled on Francis which caused me to retreat to the dairy. What a gift that place was. I had to love him for that. It didn’t leak.
But now, with hours to myself and abundant silence, recent and distant events swarmed through my thoughts. They brought me to a state of paralysis. I used to sit and stare across the oak desk at my beautiful studio, listening to the haunting note the wind sometimes made as it swept round a corner of the Barn. My thoughts would be empty, or the past crowded in. Snatches of Victorian novels were in the mix along with my own tutorial voice from recent teaching, unnaturally emphatic, a sing-song of fake kindness with which I tried to protect a dim or lazy student. I had leisure now to make myself tense with old sorrow. When Percy loomed, healthy or sick, or face down in the hall, the source of two rivers of blood, I would leave the desk and lie on the bed. Once, after I had propped up her blue teddy on a shelf, Diana arrived with an infant shriek and her brother Christopher was there, on the platform, understanding nothing. Then the other horror again, Francis in black hat and shoulder bag tapping at my window.
For distraction, I made changes to the room, shifting a vase, fiddling with the coffee machine, polishing a polished wooden surface. My old compulsion to domestic order. But I conjured another persona for myself, a spoiled rich brat, feather-bedded and stifled by comfort, nothing to struggle for, lethargic among the soft furnishings, talentless. And Francis? Having murdered my husband to have me to himself, he was in his study fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day, writing essays on four American poets, Jarrell, Lowell, Hecht and Schwartz. All men. Who cared? I would have written on four women, if only I’d had the energy and purpose. Francis’s absence, his distraction when he emerged for meals, should have been my liberation into work. But that middle-aged brat could easily persuade herself she had been seduced, betrayed and deserted, like a pallid heroine in a Richardson novel.
It cannot have been so bad. My journal, as opposed to my memory, says we talked late at night, we had sex, I cooked some ambitious meals. When he was oppressed by work, I helped him with his correspondence. The following summer I began to explore the immediate countryside, usually alone, sometimes with Rachel or Peter, by then a gangly adolescent with a passion for maths and physics. When I walked alone, I longed for Percy. I missed his constant affection and curiosity about plants and creatures. Whenever I saw something interesting, I spoke to him in my thoughts about it. There were occasions when I glanced around to make sure no one could see or hear me, and I would sit on the grass and cry.
That first year at the Barn I was teaching courses at a summer school in Oxford for American students. Their enthusiasm bucked me up and in the autumn I finally made a start on the Aikenhead book. In a long opening section, I surveyed the intellectual and religious currents of the late seventeenth century. That meant spending time in London at the Royal Society, the Wellcome Trust Library and the British Library, and in Oxford at the Bodleian. I used to overnight at Rachel’s and did my best to get along with her husband, Michael. He seemed to disapprove of me on principle, but what that principle was, I never dared to ask. I noticed now that each time I came home, I loved the Barn a little more. It was glorious to be back. By then we had a small milieu who also loved the place. Jane and Harry, obviously. John and Tony, vet and a botanist, a gay couple. The novelist Mary Sheldrake and her rakish husband, Graham. Later, a young journalist, Harriet Gage, who wrote an approving profile of Francis, and Harriet’s husband Chris, who became useful around the Barn. There were many others, but this was our core, pleasingly diverse and helpful whenever they stayed the night, cooking, washing up and sorting out the bed linen.
The Gages’ appearance in our lives led to a trivial incident that has never left me and had some consequences for my private life. It concerned an adverb. After the Feasting fuss and Francis’s new fame had faded and a year had passed, he began to suffer from status anxiety. He was forgotten in the general memory, as poets usually are. When his publisher was approached by Vanity Fair for a profile, Francis, who did not get on well with journalists, agreed, to everyone’s surprise, especially mine. To Harriet, he was determined to be pleasant when she came out one afternoon, but he could not conceal his scepticism. He denied this, but he instinctively doubted the intellectual reach of anyone who had not been to Oxford, though he respected Cambridge scientists. Harriet was a graduate of Newcastle University. She knew his work, apparently quoted from it at the right moments and asked no foolish questions. She was also beautiful and charmingly kitted out from charity shops. If he had tender thoughts about her, she was well beyond his reach. Her manner was pleasantly professional and she told me on a later visit that she loved her husband. By the time she left, after a two-hour session with Francis and a stroll round the garden with me, he had softened towards her. He softened further when the interview came out. She gave him everything – ‘the first among equals’, ‘the voice the nation barely deserved’, ‘the deepest delver into our flawed but redeemable nature’ and then, in the final line, the ‘g’ word: ‘the uncontested genius of Francis Blundy’. The photographer also served him well, despite the poet’s rudeness to him and impatience. Francis was on the magazine cover, full-bleed, softly backlit in late-afternoon light, standing against a background of the valley and its stream, the solitary genius, conveying by creased brow limited forgiveness for humankind. He read the article several times and wanted to invite Harriet to lunch.
A month later, she came with her husband, Chris, and here was another social obstacle for Francis. He was relaxed giving instructions to workmen and shopkeepers, but he was uneasy when he had to be on the level with people without formal education. He did not know what terms of reference he should be using. Or it was simply contempt, or a little of both. Certain modes of pronunciation and common solecisms pained him. He could not believe in the intelligence of someone who pronounced glottal ‘t’s, or used a ‘was’ for a ‘were’.
Chris was a tall fellow, slender and strong-looking. Very agreeable, I thought. He had not said much at lunch, so I brought him into the conversation and asked him about his work. He was explaining how he sometimes helped out at a children’s theatre, which hopefully would be getting some lottery money. Francis could stand it no more.
‘Chris, I beg you. In this household, never say “hopefully”.’
The young man looked from Francis to Harriet, then back to Francis. ‘What was that?’
Two glottals in three words would not have helped.
‘Hopefully,’ Francis explained. ‘It’s not a word. You’re murdering the language. Don’t say it.’
Chris shook his head and continued telling me about his work. When the couple had left, I confronted Francis and told him he had been unpleasant and boorish.
He said, ‘What’s that girl doing with him? He’s a fucking moron.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Then he shouldn’t talk like one.’
I also kept a close account of the next evening the Gages came to see us. It was six weeks later and this time we had Harry and Jane, and it was supper. It was a warm evening and we had been sitting out in the garden drinking. At table indoors the conversation turned to the aftermath of the Great Recession. In reply to a question from Harry, Chris Gage said that, hopefully, business would be picking up in the line of work he had been doing lately, which was marquee tents for weddings.
Francis cut in, genuinely irritated. ‘Hopefully again. Drives me mad. Chris, do the right thing. Cast it out.’
There was sudden silence. Chris put down his knife and fork, sat back and folded his arms. He spoke in grave terms, and I suspected that he had used the forbidden word deliberately and had done some work on it. ‘I wasn’t using the word as an adverb to mean “in a hopeful manner”, you know, qualifying the nearest verb. It’s a sentence adverb, Mr Blundy, it refers to the speaker’s attitude, my attitude and—’
‘Thanks, Chris. I don’t need a lesson from you in sentence adverbs.’
‘I think you do.’
The silence tightened. For once, Francis was too amazed to speak.
I had the impression that Chris was hamming up his soft cockney. Every ‘th’ was an ‘f’, all ‘t’s emphatically glottal.
He repeated, ‘I think you do. If you throw out poor old hopefully, to be consistent you’ll have to throw out a lot of other sentence adverbs doing the same work. If I say, seriously, you’re wrong, I’m not talking about the way you’re wrong. I’m talking about the way I’m telling you this. And if I say, frankly, I don’t like being talked down to, I mean I’m being frank. Admittedly – that is, I admit – this is your house, but please don’t tell me how to speak. Bluntly, it’s rude. So, if you’ll get off my back, Mr Blundy, then hopefully we’ll get along, which means not only that I hope we will, but I’m making a hopeful prediction.’
At this point, things could have gone very wrong. I had seen Francis spiral into a rage at far less, but Harry intruded with a loud bark of a laugh. ‘Francis. You are screwed.’
And so, the tension began to ease and my husband had the good sense to concede – there was no sensible alternative – and join the laughter that was gathering round the table. He said to Chris, ‘You make a good case and, surely , I owe you an apology.’
Chris leaned towards Francis and they clinked glasses, and from that time on, now it was clear that Chris was not to be pushed around, they got along well. Over time, he came out to solve many of the Barn’s problems. He fixed the leaks on the roof, sorted out the septic tank and arranged the quadrupling of our computers’ download speeds. Later, during that same evening, Jane asked Chris how he came to know so much about grammar.
‘I don’t know a thing. First time Francis jumped down my throat, I looked on Harriet’s shelves. She pointed me towards Burchfield’s Fowler and a bloke called Pinker. Seems like some ignorant snob years back picked on hopefully, and a mob of so-called educated speakers got intimidated and joined in and scared each other into never using the word and crapping on anyone who did. Pathetic!’
Soon after the adverbial supper, Francis left for New York to give a reading at the Y. I didn’t want to go. Chris came out to do some work on a fence. On the first day, just as he was leaving, I offered him tea and cake in the dairy. He was cheerful company and we had a good time. It was my idea to take him into the bedroom. He kept saying, ‘Are you sure about this?’ I was sure. Perhaps he was a stand-in for Thomas Aikenhead. For an adult, Chris had astonishing childlike eyelashes, long and dark. Naked, he was a delightful surprise. I’d forgotten what young bodies were like. My lovers had aged with or ahead of me. One gets used to the cushioning blubber around older men’s bellies. Long ago, when men’s stomachs were taut, I didn’t stop to think it was because they were young. It was simply the human form.
The fencing work took longer than Chris had expected. On the fifth day, I told him this was our last. Francis would soon be back. Chris nodded and smiled, and when he was about to leave he kissed me on the cheek and said simply, ‘Thank you,’ and I squeezed his arm and said, ‘Thank you .’ It was the cleanest ending to a brief affair I’d ever known. But it started something and soon I was restless. The dairy, I now understood, was the perfect place. Three weeks later, Francis went to a literary festival in Jamaica. Once he had phoned to report he had landed safely, I thought I would invite Harry out for supper. I don’t know what he told Jane, but the evening went well, and I soothed my conscience with the certainty that Francis would be seizing his own pleasures in the Caribbean.
Harry and I settled into an opportunistic routine. Whenever Francis was away, and once I was sure he was at his destination, Harry would come out to our place. We still took trouble to bolt ourselves in the dairy against an unexpected return and leave open the back door for a quick escape. Harry always parked a ten-minute walk away. By this time he was in his late fifties, but as a lover he was unchanged, adept and considerate, and as detached as ever. It was, of course, pleasing that he still found me attractive. He was in discussions about writing Francis’s biography and for reasons I cannot justify, this added spice to our renewed affair. I liked to tease Harry about it. Would he write about us, would we have a whole chapter to ourselves? We snatched our times together, just as we always had, and perhaps this was the only way we could flourish. We managed several years, until he became ill. The only tense moments between us came after my birthday dinner. By then matters had deteriorated between Francis and me and I was travelling to Oxford to see Harry at his old Summertown flat. I told everyone, including my journal, that I was visiting nephew Peter in London. During that time, Harry was wild about the Corona and wanted me to let him see it. He was Francis’s editor and it was a reasonable request. He kept on at me. I refused many times and finally wrote him a terse letter. It went something like, ‘I’ve made arrangements. I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want you to ask me ever again.’ That note must have gone onto Jane’s bonfire.
*
As of two weeks ago, the Kitchener archive at the University of the Highlands and Islands contains only junk, including playbills, obituary notices of friends, menus from black-tie book-prize feasts and letters from conveyancing solicitors. Deeper down in the boxes are pages we pulled from wastepaper baskets, anonymised and with dates scored out. There are twenty-seven boxes in the archive and it would take a scholar two or three weeks to establish that there is nothing useful there. In his lifetime Harry had no reputation in Scotland, but one day, Blundy scholars will take an interest. I was sorry for Harry’s memory, for he and I had some good times. But Jane was determined to obliterate him. There must have been references to me that she saw before they went on the bonfire. I was amazed that she bore me no grudge. When I asked, she insisted that women could never resist Harry. By the weak logic of the lovelorn or from a wish to avoid conflict with me, she blamed only him. I said nothing. We remain happy companions in the safe confines of the unsaid. After she found an unusual vein of clay in a hill above Smirisary, her vases, teapots and dinner plates have found a fair distribution on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.
She works in a lean-to shed at the back of the house. I like to take my morning coffee and watch her throw a pot and cradle it as it spins in her tender wet hands. She adopts an intent maternal gaze as she wills the clay into shape. But from the kitchen I sometimes hear a howl of fury as the kiln lets her down again. On our long walks we talk about our departed husbands and what our marriages tell us about ourselves. Over many years, Jane threw Harry out three times, then missed him and took him back, even when she knew he would not keep his promises. Finally, she put up with the affairs for the sake of the children and the marriage. She loved him and thought she could not live without him. After he died, she found she could, most pleasurably, and that was when her retrospective anger took hold. She had brought up the children alone, ran the household, worked long hours into the night in her studio, while Harry lived the carefree life of a single man. ‘He barely knew the names of his kids.’
We discuss her thirty-five-year-old marriage as if I was not an element in her unhappy story. This is the vital suppression we collude in, although sometimes Jane will say sadly, ‘Of course, you knew him almost as well as I did.’
And I’ll reply with something like, ‘Jane, I hardly knew him at all.’
When it’s my turn to talk about my marriage, I can’t afford the luxury of Jane’s candour. The corrupting secret that bound Francis and me has driven me, as I walk the hills with her, into devious accounts, almost too plausible to be true. I’ve worked the clichés hard. How I suffered the pressures of marriage to a famous man, how living with a creative genius was a roller-coaster ride through darkness and light, failure and triumph, how my own identity was progressively eroded. Nothing to tell of my inaction when Francis came to the house in the night with his shoulder bag. Nothing to say of my Faustian bargain, of marrying Percy’s murderer in exchange for an interesting and comfortable life. But Jane and I talk often of our childhoods, our parents and siblings, and find common ground in the space stolen from us and given to our brothers. That conversation becomes even livelier when sister Rachel comes to stay and joins in. Jane has no time for her brother’s poetry, or any poetry. She is annoyed with herself for wasting her childhood on Francis and his needs. As for the missing ‘Corona for Vivien’, she is bemused. She never asks what I’ve done with the poem. ‘They make all this fuss, but most of these people haven’t even read the stuff of his they can buy in the bookshops.’
But she has warm memories of my birthday night, the moronically named Second Immortal Dinner. ‘What an evening that was! What a lovely bunch of people! Did you know, the Sheldrakes had a row and spent a delicious night making up? The caterer or his waitress dropped one of my best ever bowls on the floor, then John Bale told us how he’d operated on a snake that got run over! And Fran read his poem. It went on forever. It was all I could do to stay awake! I’m not supposed to say it, Vivien, and I know he wrote it specially for you, but it was no bad thing that poem got lost, don’t you think? Too bloody long!’
I have no memory of the snake or of how that bowl was broken. Almost six years have passed, and Jane and I experienced different evenings. Memory is purposefully selective. Of the inconsequential moments, Francis on a climate rant stands out for me. Bad enough back then, but the years that followed made a fool of him. I think he knew it. The Corona was a retraction he could never admit to. Because he had been working on it so intensely, he cancelled appointments and hadn’t been away in three months. No chance then of seeing Harry and I missed him. The day before the dinner, I drove all the way to Ledbury where he was giving a lunchtime lecture on John Masefield, whose birthplace it was. We spent a couple of hours together in a creaky bedroom above a Tudor pub. To my surprise, Harry told me that he was ‘beginning to think’ that he loved me and that it was therefore impossible for him to commit to writing Francis’s biography. Harry said, ‘Simply too squalid, even for me.’
That room over the bar of an old pub brought back memories of my hiking jaunts with Percy and the inns where we used to lodge. On the drive back from Ledbury, I couldn’t see for tears. I pulled over and submitted to the sorrow and guilt that the years had not dispelled. When I recovered, I checked myself in the rear-view mirror. I glimpsed behind me on the back seat the chocolates, flowers and a Stilton – in case Francis asked, cover for my expedition. Those items caused me to sit for a while and reflect on the sickly compulsion of my infidelities that at other times, when I was feeling more robust, presented themselves as a healthy appetite for life. Surely, I was too old for this. In the littered layby, I felt sated, and longed for a simpler life without or beyond sex. How much more I could achieve if my thoughts were free! But an hour later I was a mile from the Barn when I found the lane blocked by a fallen oak branch. A young local farmer helped me move it, and after I had thanked him and was driving on, I fantasised about him. Nothing serious, but enough to impede for several minutes a free state of mind.
The chocolates and the rest were for the dinner the following evening. It did not trouble me as much as it might have that so much fuss was being made over my fifty-fourth birthday. My duties would be peripheral. A caterer and waitress would take charge of the meal, the setting and serving, Francis would see to the wines. I would arrange the flowers, take our friends on a tour of the autumnal garden, and later pass round the chocolates. I had known for weeks that Francis was working on a birthday poem for me and was going to read it aloud at dinner. I did not look forward to that, but I was resigned to it. He had shown me the vellum on which he was going to write out a fair copy. I no longer recall how I came to know that he was intending to destroy all other drafts and notes. I suppose I was used to his eccentric ways.
My carelessness or indifference extended in other directions. The next day, when Harry arrived for the dinner at the Barn with Jane, it meant little to him or me that we had made love in the afternoon of the previous day. We were inured to our respective betrayals and it no longer seemed tragic or even interesting that Francis was pouring a generous gin and tonic for the brother-in-law who was cuckolding him. The passing years had worn our scruples smooth. If I’d thought about it, I would have remembered that during my and Francis’s union, I’d had two lovers, whereas he had racked up at least a dozen, some of whom he would have forgotten. For him and me it would have been trivial or retrograde to declare an open relationship. Deception conferred significance. It implied that our marriage was important enough to be worth the hazard of a lie.
So many people who were not there have written about my birthday dinner and it is oddly tense to be setting down the ordinary details I can remember. It’s as if I am creeping into a house to retrieve stolen goods. It was a beautiful early evening, extremely warm for October. The caterer and waitress from Stroud came and set to work, our usual gang arrived with presents and Francis managed the welcoming drinks from his big flask. I must have taken all or most of the party outside to see the late-flowering roses. I don’t remember the conversations while we were in the garden or, later, indoors. Most likely it was Russia’s annexation of Crimea, about which Francis was obsessed and had made himself a fierce expert. Unless we helped Ukraine push the Russians out, Europe would one day soon face a new and murderous chapter in its history, was his drift. The rest of the group probably thought he was overstating the case but would not have wanted to argue. Francis was overbearing and had facts to hand that no one could question. Besides, this was supposed to be a celebration, not a war game. I steered attention back to the roses. It was a relief when Francis took Chris to inspect the sit-on lawnmower that needed repair.
As soon as the sun was down it grew cold and we sat round the fire. It must have been the prospect of reading the poem that caused Francis to be so wired up about climate change. Even by his standards he was heavily aggressive in conversation. Everyone in the room had heard him on the subject before, but nothing could stop him. I wanted to kick him hard. The general embarrassment made everyone drink more. Harry especially looked unwell and ready to leave. He was drinking wine like it was beer. Later, I would be relieved that we were almost or completely drunk. Attention and memory would usefully suffer. I remember nothing about the food that was served or how expertly it was cooked, though I know we never asked that caterer back. But I remember Harry’s speech before the reading. It was without notes and it was well over the top, a parody of extravagant claims for Francis’s poetry. He was sending up the kind of speech he himself had made at the Sheldonian when he introduced the star. Occasionally, he met my eye and I saw his drunken glee. He continued to pile it on until Francis couldn’t tolerate it and shut him up.
*
My husband was unsteady as he went round the table to take his speech from the mantelpiece. He had trouble unfastening the vellum scroll. It was so unlike him to have thought of a piece of kitsch like that. I half rose from my chair to help, but he shook his head. Then he couldn’t find his glasses. They were under his napkin by his place setting. Once they had been passed along, he was ready to begin. It took me a while to settle into the poem. I think Harry’s speech had put me in a satirical frame. There was a bucolic sonnet in praise of a landscape that could well have been the one around the Barn. The sonnet ended and just as I was getting ready to stand and thank him, he began another, with a repeat of the last line of the first. I vaguely knew the form of a corona. Birds, butterflies, wildflowers and a crested newt paraded by us as if on their way to Noah’s ark. I recalled that Francis had taken, to my surprise, various of my old field guides from the shelves.
Francis and I, as I heard it, stroll delightedly through an exquisite landscape. We are down by the stream, where he puts his hand in clear water and finds a little squat fish, a bullhead, hiding under a stone and shows it to me before gently returning it to its place in the stream. So improbable, I almost laughed out loud. In the third sonnet another figure appears, a farmer, I thought, or an old-fashioned peasant. But that is not it. This person is more ethereal, not even a mortal. He is a symbol, and then, in the fourth sonnet, a minor god, big and bearded and genial like Father Thames or Falstaff. He is seen through the eyes of this Francis and Vivien.
I looked around me. Half our guests had their eyes closed, almost asleep. When the waitress had called us to the table, I noticed as I came away from the fire that we had emptied five bottles of wine. We had each drunk two or even three glasses of the house gin and tonic, a hefty brew. If Francis was going to lay on the full fifteen sonnets, none of us was going to last the distance. Perhaps it would be a mere John Donne-seven. Then some of us might be awake by the end to rouse the others.
I too had let my thoughts wander. I did not doubt that the poem was beautiful. Its language was rich and pure and compact. There was now a gorgeous description of a swim in a river. We were on sonnet eight or nine when Falstaff reappears. He is indeed a figure of misrule. He is also fecund, abundant, an enchanted gardener, responsible for the landscape and everything that moves through it or is rooted there. I thought he must be the Green Man of legend, with foliate face, leaves for beard. In some incarnations he spews green shoots from his mouth. There was a stone carving of him by the porch of our local church, which had Saxon origins. Some scholars saw him as a bridge between pagan and Christian worlds.
Later, when I was in the kitchen helping the caterers and making coffee for the remaining guests round the fire, I unfurled the scroll and had some time to read the poem, picking up from where my attention had started to wander. The bearded figure is reaching for a fiddle. The lovers come closer to listen to his ‘awkward melody’ of broken rhythms. But suddenly he is sickening, and as he clutches his head and begins to stumble, I saw how obtuse I had been. Reading rather than listening made it clear. The luxuriant evocation of a swim downstream through a gorge, that was Percy and me in the River Wye. This green person was not a god or fertile chimera or symbol of all threatened nature. The large bearded figure was Percy. That fiddle was a violin. His sickness was Alzheimer’s. As he falls to the ground, we, that is, Francis and Vivien Blundy, move in and are by his side, but not for succour. Francis picks up a rock and, with both hands crashes it down against Percy’s forehead. The woman does not intervene.
A mere half-dozen years earlier, we would have counted any evening a failure that ended before midnight. Mary and Graham Sheldrake had gone to bed straight after dinner to repair their marriage, so I’ve learned from Jane. The rest went back round the fire to drink the coffee I had made. The party was over. The long, barely understood poem had killed it off. As we sipped, there were murmured assertions of ‘wonderful … brilliant, Francis … quite extraordinary’. Only Harry and I said nothing. He kept looking in my direction. I wanted to say to him, Not now, not here! Instead, I looked away. He and Jane were the next to leave, along with Harriet and Chris. I stood to embrace them, but I let Francis go out with them to their car. I felt bad about it, for Harry did not look well. The caterer and waitress carried their crates of crockery to their van and came back to say goodbye and receive their tip. We sat yawning and barely speaking, then John and Tony got up to leave. This time I went outside to see them off. Francis and I watched their tail-lights recede, then I turned back towards the house, reluctant to be alone with him and be obliged to talk about the poem. I did not yet know what to think.
He was close behind me as we entered the house. It was a relief when he grunted goodnight and headed towards his study. I paused to listen for the rattle of his keyboard and heard nothing. I went into the kitchen and rolled up and secured the scroll and crossed the room to rake out the fire and collect the coffee cups. In my usual way, I plumped up the cushions. I was turning off the lights when I heard a sound and turned. He was there in the kitchen, obliquely illuminated by one dimmed spot over a work surface, his head and shoulders in shadow. We were a good distance apart. There was silence. He was waiting for me to speak but I was determined not to.
At last he said, ‘I saw you reading it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
I paused. ‘I suppose it’s beautiful.’
‘But?’
I was trapped in the conversation I did not want to have. I spoke through a sigh. ‘It’s a fake. A beautiful fake.’
‘Go on.’
‘You don’t understand the natural world. You can’t conceive how it’s threatened.’
‘Yes?’
‘Plunging your hands in the stream, lifting a rock to show me a fish? Strolling the lanes, picnic in a meadow, bottle of wine, easy flow of talk? Naming the butterflies! It’s mockery.’
I was making myself angry. He was calm. As he came a little closer, I could see his face under the light.
He said, ‘What else?’
I didn’t hesitate. ‘If you can’t keep your mouth shut, go to a police station. But leave me out of it. The way you promised in the car. Remember? “All the risks will be mine.” Instead, look what happened. You said it in Amorgos – if I go down, so will you. Why isn’t blackmail in my birthday poem?’
I decided to stop. This was about to be an argument among villains. I was party to a crime and did not want myself exposed. Hardly a noble cause, and there were other matters I could not raise. I was too vulnerable and could not trust myself. I was sick with guilt. We stared at each other across the room. He stood with his arms loosely at his side, his white hair, uncut these past three months, was swept back from his enormous forehead. He reminded me of the figure I had seen and admired in the Sheldonian as he commanded the audience with his fierce stare. The downlight made a shadow under his high cheekbones. His lips were faintly pursed. I could not imagine what was coming next.
His tone was sorrowful. ‘I wrote you a poem about the two most important elements in your life, love and nature. Everyone knows I don’t like country walks. I don’t know the names of flowers and I don’t give a damn. You know I can’t swim, I’d never get married in a church. I dislike picnics. Trees, paths, the entire swarming world that isn’t human, this is what you love, not me, so I got down to learning about it. You’ve said it yourself, I’m an indoor person. If I’m not writing, I’m thinking about it. Otherwise, I’m reading. That’s all I do.’
I said, ‘You know that’s nonsense.’
‘Just hear me out. To do what I do, I need to be alone. I know I’ve neglected you. I wanted to make amends with a poem. As for the climate stuff, if that’s relevant, you know my views. This is clearly not me in the poem and therefore it’s not you. It’s not a portrait of our marriage, it’s not about me or you. It’s for you. It speaks for your interests and concerns, not mine. It’s a gift, as simple as that.’
‘It’s a confession. I didn’t ask to be implicated.’
He looked away. Across the silence we heard the indignant squeak of a little owl.
At last he said, ‘I think about it every day. I’m haunted by what I did … tormented by it and it can’t stay out of what I write. It’s driven me inwards as you’ve noticed. I deeply deeply regret it. Saying that comes nowhere near what I feel. The memories have hounded me, as they should. A few months later, I came into that money. I should have waited. I would have made sure Percy was in a place you and he would have been happy with. What I said when we were on Amorgos was despicable. I should have apologised long ago, but I completely forgot that conversation. All I can do is apologise now. You’re wrong to think the poem puts you at any kind of risk. There’s nothing there that anyone could base a case on.
‘I love you dearly, Vivien. I’m sorry – to put this at its mildest – that I’m an insufficient husband. You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that what you have in your hand is the only copy of the poem. I hope one day that will make it precious to you. Now I’m tired, beyond tired, drank too much as usual and need to go to bed. We’ll talk more in the morning if you’d like. Goodnight. And again, happy birthday.’
Like a very old man he shuffled away from the pool of light and vanished like a ghost. I don’t know why, but I called his name. He did not reappear.
I took the scroll, locked the Barn behind me and went across to the dairy. This too I locked, back and front, not against my husband or an intruder, but as if to secure myself against the evening that had passed. It surprised me that it was only eleven fifteen. I lit a fire in the woodburning stove, poured myself a drink of water and sat facing the flames. At first, soot obscured the heatproof glass, then it was burned off like an idea becoming clear. I remember thinking that first thing the next day I would make some appropriate journal entries. I was touched by what Francis had said. I went in fighting, expecting a row. He loved me – I believed that. He didn’t doubt his own sincerity. But I knew him as well as he knew me. Of course he didn’t devote every minute of his existence to writing, reading and thinking. No one could. He kept vowing to give it up, but he put himself about in public, in interviews, in readings at festivals from Trondheim to Sydney. He loved talking and drinking with friends, and why not? He liked good restaurants. He chased women and I was in no position to condemn him for it. If he neglected our marriage, it was not by necessity, it was a choice. What I’d just heard was a performance, a reading, nicely delivered. The effect was heightened by the lighting, a single spot. Still, he moved me. I could probably accept his apologies. I loved him once, and something of that lingered.
But I also hated him, and not only for what he did with a mallet. He was a thief. I’d not been able to say it to him because I might have choked up when I uttered Percy’s name. For his poem, Francis stole my best, most precious times with Percy, inserted himself into our carefree wandering across rich landscapes, into our joy in nature and passion for naming it, into our curiosity, our delight in river-swimming, our rough picnics in meadows and woods. To give his poem force, Francis crept inside Percy’s skin. If I once loved Francis to a degree, I loved and still love Percy far more. I don’t know how I can forgive a poem that ritually enacts a murder by which Francis tries to replace Percy.
Despite what Francis had said, I knew that the poem could arouse suspicion. Some bright person working for the authorities could see through Francis Blundy’s compacted style to our crime. The world believes that at the time of Percy’s death, I was the only other person in the house. If anyone pushed him down the stairs, it had to be me. I’m too cowardly to have the facts known in my lifetime, but I want them known and I’ve set them out here with their background. My passive compliance is a part. So is my faithless past. If there is to be a confession, it will be on my terms. No hiding in a mist of poetics, no symbolic figures, no buried meanings. What I’ve hoped for is the clarity Albert Camus proposed for troubled times. I should be among the last to say it, but there are occasions when prose must eclipse poetry. The verdict is clear. Francis and I deserve to be hanged, preferably from the same gallows, one straight after the other. I should go first.
I was thirsty again. I went across the room, and while I was filling my glass at the sink, I glimpsed through the window a movement on the lawn. I turned off the lights and saw by the cloudy glow of a waning gibbous moon a fox vanish into the shadow of our hedge. How fortunate that we had forgotten our long-ago dream of keeping hens.
The night was cold. Before sitting down, I put more logs on the fire, slid the air-vent knob to maximum and left the glass door open wide. I took a deep drink of water and settled back to wait for the new logs to take. At one corner of the dairy there was an accidental alignment of the brickwork or a gap in the pointing that caused a soft note to sound whenever the wind was just a little stronger than a gentle breeze. Too hard, too soft, and the whispering flute-like note would vanish. I heard it now, the unvarying pitch coming and going with the wind’s rise and fall. Its familiarity soothed me. I closed my eyes and for the first time in months, or even years, I felt expansive and peaceful, released from the fractures and tensions that the random elements of my character imposed on me. In such a state of mind, I remembered my luck in being alive, in simply being. So easy, not to have existed, so easy to forget in the fine detail of daily life, and vital to recall from time to time. That was something I learned from Percy.
The scroll was lying on my lap and it was as if my fingers had motives of their own. While I had been off in a dream, they had been fiddling with the bow I had tied not long ago in the Barn. They pulled on an end of ribbon, the knot came loose and the vellum swelled and unfurled. I sat up. Of course, I knew what I wanted. I was looking at the final sonnet, the corona, the poem’s crown. I conceded Francis his due, for it showed technical mastery, to take the first line of each of the preceding sonnets, put them together in strict sequence and make perfect and simple sense. The crowning sonnet anticipated the ultimate farewell and assumed the tone of a poised and solemn valediction. But it also contained a fond invitation. From Francis to me. We have loved each other for many years. According to the poem, we are growing old and do not have long to live, and what’s most important for us now is to wander together through our home, this earth, and, before we part forever, remind ourselves of the beauty and delight of living things and how deeply we are bound to them. The poet called up the ghost of Darwin – ‘There is grandeur in this view of life’. In our physical constitution, Francis went on, we are also bound to inanimate rocks, water and air.
The miracle, I decided that evening in 2014, was that the poet could force these ideas into existence in such flowing terms against the grain of his being, and confer the magic of the impersonal and universal that touches all great art. But the miracle was also a lie. The invitation was not merely to a stroll. It was a summons to a journey that Francis, the man, not the poet, never wanted to take, though he knew that Percy would have taken it with me. If ‘A Corona for Vivien’, Francis Blundy’s finest poem, lived into the future it would be admired down through the generations. I was certain of that. Wrenched by time from its context, the poem would attain perfection.
But if this masterpiece passed into oblivion, no one would give it a thought and a thousand scholarly papers would never be written. A murder would be avenged – by a party to the crime – and Francis could never steal Percy from me. What would remain would be this, my plain account, which might one day be found. I rolled up the scroll, tied it and balanced it in my palm – so light, so weighty. I leaned forward and felt the stove’s raw heat on my face drawing me closer. I stretched out my hand, let go, and in an instant of brightness it was done.
Glenuig
July 2020
Tamekia Corke
I like your blog.